Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Edith Mitchell Dabbs,
October 4, 1975. Interview G-0022. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series G. Southern Women. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (G-0022)

Author: Elizabeth Jacoway Burns

Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Edith Mitchell Dabbs,
October 4, 1975. Interview G-0022. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series G. Southern Women. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (G-0022)

Author: Edith Mitchell Dabbs

Description: 462 Mb

Description: 103 p.

Note:
Interview conducted on October 4, 1975, by Elizabeth
Jacoway Burns; recorded in Mayesville, South Carolina.

Note:
Transcribed by Joe Jaros.

Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series G. Southern Women, Manuscripts Department, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

Editorial practicesAn audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines.Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references.All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "All em dashes are encoded as —

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

Page 1

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… having her life complicated by the fact that she was just like
everybody else you know, in spite of the fact of all that she was
supposed to be and I guess from my earliest memories, a lot of my little
disappointments and childish unhappy memories, stemmed from those that I
knew I didn't measure up to what my preacher father expected me to be. I
remember once we had an awful blow-up—that was after I was in college or
ready for college and I did something he didn't like at all. I rode from
a picnic across town back into town, from the edge of town back down
into the middle of this little highway of this "great white way" in the
middle of this little town of about 4,000 maybe…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What town?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It was Johnston, South Carolina, Johnston in Edgefield County. I've
always lived in South Carolina, somewhere. It was a picnic of some kind
on the school grounds or the church grounds or something—and somebody, a
boy I was talking to, had a job at a drugstore downtown and he had to
get one particular errand done at a certain time at that drugstore. Most
of the day, he was free to stay down there, but he invited me to ride
with him in his car back down to the drugstore long enough for him to go
do whatever it was that he had to do—it had to do with a prescription or
something—a perfectly normal boy—sort of a task, but I went, without
anybody's permission, because at that time I still was supposed to get
permission to get in a car with anybody. I didn't manage to get down
there and wait in the car about five minutes while he attended to his
business and then drive back to the schoolhouse without being seen.
Somebody found it out and of course it was duly reported to my father
and mother. My father was furious, perfectly furious. It took me days
and days to

Page 2

figure out why he thought it was such a
bad thing, not just that I had not asked his permission, which was a
pure defiance to him. But there was something terribly wrong about it
that I couldn't figure out at all, and later on, days and days and days
later, I found out … how, I can't remember, whether I overheard him
talking to Mama or whether Mama told me or I got it through somebody
else, but it turned out that as he saw it, I had ridden with this
"strange" man, someone outside of the family, downtown right straight
smack through the red light district. [Laughter]
Well, I didn't know that there was such a thing.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And that raised your curiosity, I'm sure.
[Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And Papa was so angry about it because he said, "You can undo in one
silly rash act like that what I have been working years to build up." I
immediately got furious because I felt he wasn't concerned with what I
was doing, he knew that I hadn't done anything wrong, he wasn't worried
about me, he was worried about his reputation, that his boys, his sons
and everybody else in his family should do just exactly what a
preacher's family out to do. And so all my life, growing up, I was
hemmed in by those snobbish little standards that small towners, or big
towners either have, everybody … not just small towns, you know more
about it in small towns because everybody is a neighbor, but it's there
anyway, it's just people. They were cruel sometimes, standards that
people set for you and I hated it. More and more from then on, I hated
the feeling that other people could set my standards and I suppose that
I've got more rebellions about making my own rules and defying. James
used to tell me if there was a fence anywhere if I saw it, if it was a
long distance, I'd go crawl under it or crawl over it just to prove it
wasn't there. And I guess that's the way I am. But there were so many
restrictions of that kind, always having to do a

Page 3

little bit better than others. I myself better, so that it was an easy
thing to do and I didn't always do it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So, it sounds as if you were just as ornery as James was.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

That may have been.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did you grow up in the same town? Did you live in the same town?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. No, I lived there only a couple of years while I was in college. I
had finished high school and I believe that I had a year of college a
year or so when I moved there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Where did you go to college?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, my first year, I went to a college that doesn't exist any longer.
Furman University now is the combination of what was two colleges,
Furman and the Greenville Woman's College. I believe before it was
Greenville Female Institute or something … and when I knew it way back
in the twenties, it was Greenville Woman's College. We lived at that
time … [unknown], where did we live? See, I wasn't with
the family because I was in school. Pickens County. Then, for my second
year in college, I transferred to Coker, down to this part of the state
because my father moved down to Edgefield County to preach. He was a
Baptist preacher and that put me a little nearer the family, I didn't
have to travel so terribly far to school. It is curious, that mattered
an awful lot then. It doesn't at all now, to have to travel across the
state. But it was a very different thing then, you went everywhere on
the train and travel was expensive at the time and the thinking was that
it was very dangerous for a young woman to go alone. Even if she was
traveling with forty-nine other classmates, it was still thought
dangerous.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Especially if you are so ornery.

Page 4

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Probably so. [Laughter] They always knew
that there was some danger of my breaking out at any point. [Laughter]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

How many children were in your family?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, we had the kind of family that you don't see every day anymore,
there were four boys and two girls and since I was the oldest one, I had
a lot of responsibility for being a sort of second mother and my poor
Mama could have used several seconds. In those days, a preacher made so
little money [interruption] and we always
had a garden that fed the family and fed them regularly, too. There were
always some chickens and a cow, a pig or two or three, which meant a lot
of work as well as some advantages. I remember when I was little, we
moved up to … I was born down here in Sumter County. As it happens, Mama
had been before me from Sumter County and I was born over here at
Dalzell, and when I was one whole year old, they moved to the next
little town, Lynchburg, still in Sumter County. Then, when I was three,
we moved up to Landrum in Spartanburg County, clean across the state, up
to the mountain country. And Papa was happy up there because he came
from that part of the state and he loved the mountains and he had missed
it ever since he had been down here. So, that was his turn. Mama was
more at home down here in the flat country. But I remember they told me
that for a year there, and this was the third time that it had happened,
Papa had preached in three places and that was my third place to live,
in each place he lived for one year in some sort of gerry built interim
quarters, very uncomfortable, very cramped while he built a parsonage or
built a church or something. It happened over and over, and at Landrum,
we lived in some style, I guess for part of that

Page 5

year, at least, we stayed at a hotel, the hotel. Mama
used to tell me that I started wandering from home and going my own way
at the tender age of three because I was very much fascinated by a
little boy who was just about my age… What was his name? Bob? No …I
don't remember what his family's name was at all and I never knew him
after we were big enough to be really good friends, rememberable
friends. But, I had a little red wagon and Mama said that every morning,
the first time that she would take hers eyes off me or look back for a
minute, I would be headed down the street with my little red wagon going
to see Tom, going to play with Tom. It sounds like I was an extrovert
and I don't think I ever have been. I think of myself as being turned in
and I don't know whether I am or not.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, I have always thought of you as being really extroverted, in-dwelling
and very sensitive and not showing all the time how sensitive you are,
because you are so approachable.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I haven't thought of the term, "in-dwelling." Now, that sort of could put
a different light on it. I'll tell you something that James always
claimed he had—and he was right—and I smiled at it for years. He said
that he was shy, he was terribly shy. He was, but I could much more
easily understand that I am than I could understand that he was, because
he didn't look shy, and he was such an attractive personality that
people reached to him and he always reached back, but whether I was an
extrovert or not … I remember a lot of things from that period. We lived
there from the time I was three until I got to be nine years old and we
came down the state again to Florencetown. I was in the fourth grade.

One thing I remember about that stretch up at Landrum was the field day
that we used to have. Did you ever hear about field days?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

No.

Page 6

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, they are kind of like minature county fairs. They are a town fair
or a community fair, the kind of thing that they have down at Penn.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

With all kinds of games?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Games, yes. Contests.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Competition?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Mama used to always get a prize for her best butter and a certain
lady would get the best pound cake and somebody else would get the best
blackberry pie, that kind of thing. But Mama always took home the prize
for the best butter and I remember that once she got a silver butter
knife for a prize and a little dish that you sort of patted it out in,
that made pats of butter. One of the things that I used to compete for
in the field day at home was a jumproping contest. We always had that
for the little girls and boys, the girls really went to town on that
one. And they had a greasy pole to climb, they had a greasy pig for the
men or boys or whoever to catch. I remember that the little boys could
usually outdo the men on that one, they were I suppose [unknown] more agile, the men were … they could squirm
around and I remember jumping rope one time until the contest was won
and I kept on jumping because I felt like I was just beginning to fly. I
had the feeling that I was sailing through the air. I had such a good
time. My father made me stop and said that there wasn't any need to keep
on. The idea was to see how many times you could jump before you stopped
and I guess that he never had paid enough attention to our playing, he
kept up with our work, but he had not noticed enough to realize that I
wasn't hurting myself at all. I'm sure that I wasn't really tied at all.
I felt so light and free. So, he made me stop and said that there was no
point in keeping on because I had won.

I had [unknown]. I'm sure that I didn't understand him a
lot of times, because he had a certain

Page 7

shyness of
his own. When he was well up, I suppose around seventy or more, no, he
wasn't that old. Mama died at fifty-five, he was ten years older, so he
was only sixty-five then and Mama was living at the time, so it was when
he was around sixty, I guess, he began to have some trouble with his
left … well, he said his knee, his left knee. When he went to sit down
on a chair, he would almost let himself down and then before he quite
got to the chair, he would drop the rest of the way, he couldn't control
his knee muscles at all. He got worried about it. He finally broke down
and went to a doctor, which he didn't do often. You didn't do it in our
family for anything short of a fear of death. But he went to have
himself checked and the doctor asked him if he had ever been sick as a
child. Papa couldn't remember that he had. He never was able to remember
being sick, but he did remember that when he was a little boy, he stayed
in the house a lot and his mother had been very protective of him. They
lived out in the country, on a farm, they all worked hard and she
couldn't protect him in a pampering sort of way, they were not affluent
enough to do that, but she was very considerate of him and tried to keep
him busy with other things so that he wouldn't play with the big boys
quite so much. But he had to go with the big boys and he said that he
remembered when he could get out and run with the other boys, when she
would let him, then he was always the last one in the line. One or two
boys who were smaller than he was would run faster than him. He
remembered feeling that something was wrong, he was sort of set aside,
discriminated against because the other boys were quicker than he
was.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was he an only child?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. He was one of a big family and he was one of the older members of
the family, but when he was little, he was smaller than the playmates
around and yet he felt that he was enough, he tagged behind more than
was justified by the size. I

Page 8

(The doctor believed he
may have suffered an undiagnosed case of polio as a child.) often
wondered if that was the reason … I've even wondered if he tried to
compensate for being physically being quite not up to snuff in his own
opinion, by being something like a minister or a leader of some kind who
could have his turn at calling the shots, you know. In the community, he
would have a power that he couldn't get by outrunning somebody,
physically, he could outtalk them.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What was your father's name?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

He was John Mitchell, John Hampton Mitchell. His middle name sort of
dates him, the Wade Hampton days, I guess.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Has your family always been a South Carolina family?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes, my mother's and his family were always in South Carolina as far
back as they bothered to look.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who was your mother?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

My mother was a Wells from this county and her mother …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

She was from Sumter County?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Her mother was a Charleston family and my father's parents were
upcountry Piedmont people who were of a very different background, in
his opinion, a lazy southern, shiftless and maybe snobbish lowcountry
people. He always had a fairly strong prejudice against the coastal …
anything that smacked of an aristocratic background and yet his sisters,
I remember, were great DAR people and UDC people. I don't know whether
they disgusted him with their prizing so much their background, or
whether he just didn't believe it was so, or what. He used to make great
fun of that and he never let Mama talk much about her family. He was
saracastic about it. I didn't learn a lot of things I wish I knew about
Mama's family. Grandma Wells had been a Mellichamp and her family was
intermingled

Page 9

with the most prominent Charleston
names there were in the city. If you wanted to be snobbish, you couldn't
get past that. Papa had very little use for that, he didn't like her to
talk about it. I started off as a child thinking, "Well, you must not
have anything to brag about or you would let Mama tell about her folks."
Mama was a very humble sort of person, of course, I think that she
overdid it for her own good, but she had great genuine affection for
members of her family and since the Civil War, they had all had such a
hard time economically, so that she liked to prize what they did have,
self-respect, integrity, and an ability to come up again no matter what
happened to them and that sort of thing. Papa was very suspicious of
anything on that subject our family discussed. He said that people
should be more concerned with where they were going and less concerned
with where they came from. He dismissed it that way.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, that sounds like you had impeccable southern credentials.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

That's a little bit like James' family. His father was, as he said, from
the yeoman level of society, from the yeoman farmer background and his
mother had a plantation background. His father's practical, hard-headed
business sense made him skeptical of his mother's easy-going,
aristocratic, be-nice-and-maybe-lose-your-shirt-doing-it kinspeople.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So, you both grew up with than kind of ambivalence?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, very similar.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

It sounds like you both responded to it in the same way.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I suppose that you get that combination when you put that together. I
never thought about it once until James began to talk about the
ambivalence in his background and then I realized that I had the same
thing.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Now, what was James' father's name and his mother's name?

Page 10

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, his father, Eugene Dabbs, was descended from a Dabbs who came from
England to Virginia. There were two brothers who came over, I think, one
came down through the Carolinas and the other went more to the west.
There haven't been a whole lot of Dabbs related to us. North Carolina is
full of them, western North Carolina. There are just scores and scores
of them, but in South Carolina, there are very few and well, none at
present, almost none who are related to us at all. He had a background …
we all have, of course, but he found out about his and the family
thought that it was rather interesting, and kept up with it, of
Revolutionary soldiers, service. James liked to talk about Gregg?
Bodie?, Gregg's history of South Carolina, I guess I don't remember
which one. Anyhow, the Whigs were the rebels, weren't they? Well … who
were the loyalists to the Crown?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The Tories.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

The Tories. Well, he said that in writing this history, the historian
said that the Whigs would sometimes capture the Tories and kill so many
Tories in a battle or an engagement, but when the Tories fought Whigs,
they murdered them. [Laughter] The
historian's bias comes out, if we don't think about this sometime
Anyway, he always identified these stories with himself and his family,
stories of the Revolution. Actually, his family was in this area at the
time of the Revolution and in the community. That was 'way back, the
1750s, the grant for this particular land was given to Peter Mellette
and then the Mellettes sold it to Samuel McBride, I believe, who was
James' great-grandfather. So, his family was here as long as there was
any community, as early as there was any community here. That took in
the Revolution.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

They were the founders of Mayesville?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Among them, yes. Before Mayesville, this was a community.

Page 11

People came up from Charleston, they landed at Charleston
and came up through Williamsburg and from Williamsburg on up to here and
then spread out from here. When you settle a new community, it had to
have time to sort of develop and be big enough to found another. You
usually started a church in the next little community, or some miles
away that became the next community.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What was the church here? Was this Anglican?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, this was always Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian. There were not a
lot of Presbyterians in the lower part of the state, but …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, McBride, I guess that was a Scotch name.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, it was, Scotch-Irish, from Williamsburg. Most of these settlers who
came in that way were Scotch-Irish and they established Presbyterian
churches as they came. At Williamsburg and then about half-way between
there and here, a church called Midway, for that reason, and then
here.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

At Midway, Georgia?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, this was Midway, South Carolina. It is about half-way between
Williamsburg and this church and then they came all the way up here. I
believe that the Williamsburg people came up here and made this church
first and then they put Midway in between. Then they reached out and had
another chapel that became a church at Mayesville, ten miles further.
That's the way that they planted the next community. I suppose that the
Presbyterian strength is due to the fact that there were so many Scotch
Presbyterians coming in. They had a lot of immigrants and they pretty
well came along up the Black River, settling communities as they came up
the river.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who was James' mother?

Page 12

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

His mother was a McBride, one of those Scotch-Irish families. They came
here from Williamsburg and they weren't here for long. Some of them
stayed but others moved right on up. Samuel McBride came into this
community as a bachelor. It seems that he married the Widow James. When
I heard that, I immediately saw the Widow James … I saw Samuel McBride
as a man of at least forty, maybe forty-five. It sounded like he would
be, especially if he was taken by the Widow James and the widow I saw as
a sort of a prune-mouthed little old lady with a bun on the back of her
head, maybe very rightous and a tough pioneer type, you know. I found
out one day, I think I must have been reading tombstones down at the
church, and I discovered that she was seventeen years old. [Laughter] She was already widowed at
seventeen. Samuel McBride married her and then she died and he married a
second time to Martha Rueberry, who was a Charleston person … now wait a
minute. Yes, that's right … I'm getting mixed up on James' own family.
That's right. They had only one son, Samuel McBride and Martha had one
son, one child, who was James McBride. He built this house when he was
eighteen years old.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

In 1859?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

1858 to '60, along there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

I've always wondered why they named it Rip Raps Plantation?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, actually, we made a mistake when we came back here. James told me
better and I sort of pushed the other way and bless his heart, he did
what he always did, he let me have my way, but I sort of blew it. The
plantation was named Egypt Farm. I wish that we had kept that name. He
liked that name and it somehow didn't sound plantationy enough to me and
I was sort of carried away with the idea of a plantation, I guess, and I
pulled for Rip

Page 13

Raps Plantation. Well, they were
two different things. The whole acreage, the whole ten thousand acres
was Egypt Farms. So named because Samuel McBride was such a farmer, such
a successful corn farmer, that trains of wagons came down from North
Carolina to buy corn from him —they came down to Egypt Farm to get corn—
and the place was called Egypt Farm There is stationery, in James'
father's letters, a few scattered things, letterheaded, called "Egypt
and Pineland Farms."

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And was there a farmhouse here before they built this one?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. Well, I didn't answer your question about Rip Raps. The whole estate,
the whole plantation was Egypt Farms. When James McBride had built the
house [unknown], which must have been about '61, after he
had finished building the house and the war had started, very early in
the war, he wanted to be a soldier like all his friends. But, he had
tuberculosis. He was not well enough and was very ill. He was not fit to
carry arms and they would not take him in the service. So, he got
permission to help by going behind the lines and nursing the wounded
soldiers. I found among James' papers, my James' papers, his grandson's
a pass issued to James Samuel McBride allowing him to get through the
lines as a male nurse.

But on the way back from one of those trips, or on the way back from a
visit, nobody has ever been able to tell for sure, he and his party at
some time camped by a little river up in the mountains of Virginia that
was called the Rip Raps River and he lay all night listening to that
little river and thought that he would never forget the sound of it.
Shortly after he got home, there came a real gully-washing,
stump-rooting rain and he lay in his bedroom listening to the water
rushing down the pipes and said that it sounded just like that sound of
the little Rip Raps River in Virginia and he believed that he would name
the house Rip Raps. So, it was the house that was named Rip Raps. When
we came here, I made the

Page 14

mistake of putting the
wrong things together. James had to have some stationery printed and I
said, "Why don't you put Rip Raps Plantation on it?" I remember that he
said, "Well, it wasn't actually Rip Raps Plantation, the whole
plantation wasn't called Rip Raps, it was called Egypt Farms." That
sounded like more of the Bible, you know, than what I had grown up with,
I guess. It didn't sound as interesting as Rip Raps, which I had never
heard before. So, I said that I liked the sound of that better and he
said, "Well, all right. It's ours and we can call it what we please." We
stuck with that. But I think that it would have been nice to actually
call it Egypt Farms. I've got a few more years now and grown up a
little. [Laughter] What was it that you
started to ask me about?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was the original Egypt Farms house here?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, no. The house that was here before Samuel McBride, that young … what
was her first name? Anyhow, the Widow James, the daughter of one of the
first settlers in this place—that's the name on the tombstone of Brick
Church —James Bradley. I suppose that he had bought some land here and
given his daughter some or else, the James she married had bought it.
They were living here down in the building that is now our big barn in
the lot. That high, ramshackle -looking old two-stor barn. It has a
very, very crude circular stairway in the corner, a squared off, awful
looking thing that is probably not very substantial now if you tried to
climb it. But, it was a staircase right in the corner that circled
around a little bit, twisted, anyway. That was their house and I
understand that even before that, there had been one down in the swamp,
on the bluff of the swamp on the river. When they came up the river,
they first settled right at the river and then they moved back futher
because it was so unhealthy down there. So, they built the second house
down there

Page 15

on the bluff of the river, after the
log house. They built what is now the big barn. After a time, they
decided that it should be futher back from the water. They cleared the
fields and they moved the house over there. They managed to roll that
house, that big old barn, up to where it is now. It was used for a house
there for awhile and then it became a barn and then Samuel McBride
married the young widow and they built a home in what is now our back
yard. You can see the bricks level with the ground showing where the
foundation stood. They lived in that for a long time. It was built of
hand hewn timbers put together without nails and from the foundation, it
was big, spread over quite an area.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's just one of the thousands of things around here that makes you
feel like you are so in touch with your past. Don't you think?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I never walk by and see bricks on the ground, I see house
foundations, every single time. And I nearly always have least a
fleeting thought when I see that of the way the house faced, not
straight to the north like this one, I think that it did face straight
north, but looked out a little bit to the left of this house. I have
found out here in the lines following those bricks that it went all the
way out to the present road, almost to the present road to where an
Indian trail had gone by and it twisted back again and came into the old
Kingstree Road. That was the old avenue out and I found in the woods
here and there a crepe myrtle bush or a breath of spring which is
usually a domesticated plant that I'm sure were planted by the avenue on
the side of the road. There are some right out here on the side of the
lawn where, when I cam here, that was woods. We saved that bush because
it sort of lined up and I thought it was healthy.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But those aren't any of the ghosts who live in this house?

Page 16

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, I don't think so. [Laughter]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who are the ghosts who live in this house?
[Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I've always claimed that the grandmother must be here because I've
insisted that I've heard one. I can remember that very vividly. I can't
swear to it, but I've heard what certainly sounded like a young girl or
small person coming down the steps one night. In the middle of the
night, I suddenly woke up to a perfectly still world, with not a sound
anywhere, because I heard somebody coming down the stairs dressed, or
with shoes on. Well, it came very steadily and lightly down to the third
step and stopped. It sounded like she lacked a step or two before
getting to the floor, but she just stopped and was waiting. Well, I
couldn't stand it. It was like leaving the last note of something not
struck, you know? The last chord. I had to see it, so I slid over to the
edge of my big high bed without waking James and peeked out. It was a
brilliant moonlit night and I counted on that light up the hall. We
always slept with our door to the hall wide open, because I wanted to
hear if Carolyn made a noise in the night or anything.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But there weren't any children upstairs?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, Carolyn slept upstairs, she was just six years old. And little baby
James was in the basket right by my bed where I could reach out and
touch him if he moved. I went to the door and looked out in the hall and
I could see everywhere and there was nobody there. The hall was lighted
enough with the bright moonlight that was coming through the house with
all the doors open and all with the light shining through. There were
parts of it lighter than others, but the staircase was perfectly visible
and the whole hall was perfectly visible and there wasn't a soul except
myself. So, I told James, you know, half-joking but still

Page 17

puzzled by the whole thing, that somebody came downstairs
in the middle of the night and I never had figured out who it was. He
said, "Well, what do you think?" I said, "Well, my guess would be, of
course, that it was your grandmother. But then I have seen pictures of
her and it couldn't have been her because she was slightly on the heavy
side. She wasn't really a heavy person, she wasn't a fat person, but she
wasn't slight and this was a very young, a very small person, a light
one." He looked at me rather strangely but just smiled and said nothing.
Well, he heard me tell that a couple of times and after I had told it
about twice, it began to get like a good story and I began to believe
the whole thing, especially since that much had actually happened. One
time … he never made any comment about it at all until one time a cousin
of his was here who had grown up … she was a niece of his grandmother
and had known her as "Auntie" and lived here in the house a lot of
summers and so on with her and knew her quite well. She was telling me
things that she remembered about her one day and she said, "She was the
tiniest lady, she wore number one shoes."

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, my word.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I came back and told James about that and said, "James, you know that I
said I heard your grandmother in the house one night but it couldn't
have been your grandmother because it was a small woman and your
grandmother was a heavy person and Virginia tells me that your
grandmother wore a number one shoe. What goes on here?" He just laughed
and patted me, to indicate that he didn't want me to take it so
seriously and he said, "Yes, she was little, but the picture you
remembered was my mother, not my grandmother He knew that picture I had
seen at home, it hadn't often been shown. He said that was his mother

Page 18

and not his grandmother and that his
grandmother was small. He said, "I remember her and she was a little
lady." Well, James McBride died when he was about twenty-three and that
little grandmother lived on to be an old lady in this house.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That grandmother was the Widow James?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. She …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

No, that's right. James McBride was the one who came back from the Civil
War with tuberculosis and named it Rip Raps.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. James McBride was my James' grandfather. Yes, that's right. Now,
what did I say that was wrong? I jumped the track on one of those, I
missed a generation in there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You didn't tell us who James McBride married.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. The little grandmother that I've been talking about was James'
grandmother. That was Mrs. James McBride, yes. She was from Georgia. She
had grown up at Jonesboro, Georgia just south of Atlanta, I think, not
very far from Atlanta. I've never been there, but other members of the
family have just for fun It seems that … Sophie Warren married James
McBride. It seems that Sophie's family, her parents and a big family of
children, of which she was the oldest, owned a sizeable plantation
there, I don't know how big it was. I don't think that it was as big as
this, but it was a big one. When Sherman came through on his march and
burned Atlanta and everything else he could find, he had officers, I
don't remember who they were, but the home of Sophie Warren's family was
confiscated by Sherman's men and used as headquarters for one of the
officers. That way, it escaped destruction. So that at the end of the
war, when most people were land poor and most people who had large land
holdings were loosing them, because they couldn't

Page 19

find enough cash to pay taxes on them, Sophie and her father, James
McBride's widow by that time, you see he had died during the war, his
widow and her two little children got her father to come here. Well, I
suppose that he came up actually during the war when they were run out
of the house and fled up here as refugees. But she asked him to come
when James McBride, her husband, her husband died. Her mother had died,
too, along about the same time. I don't know the chronology in there,
but she wrote her father that if he would come up here and run the
plantation for her, she would bring up the children for him, her
brothers and sisters. There were at least half a dozen of them, six or
eight of them to be brought up. So, this house was full of young people
for a long, long time. She mothered them all and he handled the farm. I
was told that … a cousin, Virginia Warren, told me that after the war
was over and those people who could were redeeming their land by paying
taxes, both of these farms were in danger of being sold lost completely,
for taxes and the widow and her father, Grandmother Sophie and her
father, …

New tape

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… finally worked it out that he would sell the property in Georgia at
Jonesboro to get enough money to pay taxes on this place and they would
have one left. So, they did that and they spent their lives here, her
whole family lived out their lives or else left from here. This was home
from then on. A couple of them went north. They didn't all stay right
here, but anyhow, this became the home seat of the Warrens as well as
the McBrides

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So then, which one of her children was James' mother?

Page 20

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, she had a little boy and girl. The son died, lived to be sixty odd.
He finished at the university in Columbia and was invited to come back
to teach math, to head the math department. I understand he was quite a
musician, he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had that old southern
feeling that he had to go home and take care of his mother and the
womenfolk and no one was expected to stand up to handling a whole darm,
and it was a different proposition too, not as organized as it had been
and since the war was over, there were no automatic slaves, I mean
automatic servants to do the work as they had in slavery days. It was a
whole life choice that he decided to come back here. He never did a lot
of things that he might have done and would have enjoyed doing very
much, because he was devoted to his family and But he never married and
his sister, his sister was a couple years older than he, his sister
married Eugene Dabbs, my James' mother Maude, married Eugene Dabbs. Now,
Gene came down here to this community from around Cheraw and the
Darlington district, it was a district before it was a county. He came
down from Darlington district in … oh, when would that have been? It was
late enough that Maude was a young lady, I suppose a teenager. He did
not come directly to this community. He went first over to Privateer, I
guess it was, on the other side of Sumter, in the Richard Furman
settlement over there, and got a job as overseer of the Furman
plantation. He fell in love with a Furman girl, Susan Furman, Sudy, they
called her. Sudy was a nurse and she was a very religious sort of
person, rather straitlaced but very attractive, too. Her father didn't
think too highly of her being so fond of this young fellow who came from
nobody knew where, way up in the

Page 21

Darlington
district. He was the man of the house by the time that he was seventeen,
I think. He had lost his father and so, his mother decided that she
would leave the whole place and go off and make a new start. He had come
down with his mother and her brother, the mother and an uncle, in a
couple of wagonloads of furniture to start all over again. Dr. Furman
didn't think too much of him as a son-in-law because he didn't know
enough about him. He wasn't sure that he had enough columns on the
piazzas in his background and that sort of thing. He discouraged this.
Sudy couldn't be sure that there was in his background. But Sudy was
sort of frustrated over the whole thing. You didn't talk back to your
parents in those days, you learned to [unknown], but she
decided to go away as a missionary, a medical missionary to Cuba and she
went.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Her father let her do that?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. That at least, was respectable, it was doing the work of the
Lord. So, she went to Cuba and was gone for some years, I don't know how
long. That broke up the romance and when she left, Father left, Eugene
left that job, too. He came over here to this community and got a job as
overseer of the next plantation to this one, the Witherspoon plantation.
But he was still just a very young man, very young, you see, barely
twenty. He made a good job of it. They were devoted to him and he was
one of the members of the family. That was nothing degrading about at
all, about being the manager of a plantation, and he had quite an
important job in that period. Anyhow, after he had been here a little
while, he began to fall in love with a little girl from this house,
Mother Maude. So, he and Maude McBride were married and they set up [unknown] and later on built their own house. They lived
together to have a family of six children and when the youngest,
McBride, was two years old, Mother

Page 22

Maude died of
typhoid. They had just gotten into their new house a short time, because
James was eight years older than McBride and he was ten when his mother
died.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

McBride was the baby?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. He remembers that his father and mother decided to build a new
house, their own house and they packed up everything and moved to where
they were going to live. They set up a camp in the woods, they built a
house camp, you know, which is still standing. It was used for years as
a double garage later on and it is still standing and sort of a little
storehouse out there, we still call it the camp, in the backyard of
McBride's house. The house he is living in now is the one that they
built. They moved only two miles from where they had been and yet it is
so totally … they camped out for about a year before they ever got that
house built.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, this house was still filled with people.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, some of them. By that time, though, the next generation didn't live
here. You see, James' aunts and uncles that were all growing up with his
mother and uncle, too. The generations were kind of half spaced. But
they all grew up about the same time, so when his mother moved out, his
aunts and uncles were moving out, too. The interesting thing was, when
Mother Maude died and left the baby of two and then five older children
…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And James was the oldest?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

James was next to the oldest, Eugene was the oldest. An aunt who had
grown up in this house, Aunt Alice, one of the little sisters who came
here … there was Aunt Harriet, Aunt Alice, Aunt Louisa and there was
another one …Aunt Julia. Louisa got married but the other

Page 23

three aunts were living at the summer house here, about two
miles away and Aunt Alice went over to stay with James' father and took
care of the children after Mother Maude died. She was a teacher, taught
him and [unknown] and she was a housekeeper for her
brother-in-law and … wait a minute. No. She was Maude's aunt and James'
great-aunt, but they had grown up like sisters and felt like sisters and
when Maude died, she came over to take care of Maude's children. She
stayed for I don't know how long, a year or something, and then Father
married a second time, this time to Mother Sudy, Sudy Furman. She had
come back from Cuba and was nursing in the hospital in Sumter and had
settled back in her old home. So, he married his other sweetheart and
the children's stepmother was Mother Sudy. It is rather an unusual tale
about how they circled around and came back again. That circle may have
been a straight line.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Yes, Sudy never had gotten married?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. She hadn't. Apparently she never had had any other …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, was she real religious, she had been a missionary?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. She was a Baptist. And Father's people were Presbyterian. Out here
in this community, there was only one church, the Presbyterian church.
Well, Mother Sudy went to church because you went to church, but nobody
changed her from being Baptist inside. James had a tale that he liked to
tell about his father and the way that Mother Sudy could handle him. He
said that Mother Sudy could pin him with one look if she needed to and
he obeyed without any question, but he could be a little abrupt with her
if he wanted to. He could be a delightful person, but he had a temper
like all outdoors. He talked big and threatened big and everybody liked
him. Well, something happened among the Baptists, the Baptist
denomination, some very responsible officer in the denomination who was
very high up in the hierarchy, the treasurer of some

Page 24

area had absconded with ?75,000, which was just millions in those
days. And all of a sudden the news broke and all of the churches
everywhere knew all about it, and I've heard it so often that ?75,000
stuck in my mind from that day until this as the worst figure that you
could steal, if you were going to do any steal It happened here at the
same time, it was like a volcano erupting, it just blows up and
everybody knows that it is evident. Well, I have a memory of people
talking about that for a long, long time. I've forgotten the name of the
man who did all that dastardly deed and that sort of thing, but I
remember what the crime was and how much talk about it there was. James
remembered that they learned about it through the newspapers, because
they were, after all, Presbyterians and above all that sort of thing.
[Laughter] But you didn't say that
around Mother Sudy. She was mortified, she had a chip on her shoulder
and felt very embarrased and humiliated because she was a Baptist and
this thing had happened in the Baptist church and she was in no mood for
any levity about it, at all. But they went to church one day shortly
after that happened and Eugene, older than James, but still young enough
to do these things, I guess, when the collection plate came around, he
reached in and took out a nickel. Someone else put one in and he reached
in and took it out. His mother saw what he was doing and [unknown] So, when they got home, all of the family was
sitting there around the dinner table and somebody told that Gene had
reached in and taken a nickel out of the plate. Well, Father at one end
of the table looked down to Mother at the other end and Father said,
"Huh, must be a Baptist." It was the first thing that popped into his
mind and he had forgotten that he wasn't

Page 25

supposed
to to mention it. He said it and just laughed and then happened to look
up and saw her face and he just froze. James said that she pinned his
ears back with one look. [Laughter] He was
just about to laugh and he had something in his mouth, he had taken a
drink of water or something and he laughed and the water shot out. You
could see it all over everything and he was so embarrassed he didn't
know what to do. He wanted to laugh but had to stop right there in
mid-air, but the water wouldn't stop. But he had to stop his face
muscles from laughing. They were making jokes about Baptists taking
money out of the collection plates. She was a Baptist all the days of
her life, violently Baptist.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did James like her?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. He liked her. He felt that she was a very stern person and to
him, she never seemed quite as sensitive and gentle, certainly not as
gentle as his mother had been. But he had the greatest respect for her
and great fondness for her. She was just a different type of person. And
after all, his mother had had children from the beginning and loved them
up and this stepmother had started late.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

She brought them up.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The whole family.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

She had taken them on and it was a different proposition entirely. And
she was a little more reserved and a little firmer than his mother.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, where did James get his poetic spirit? It sounds like his father
was a big blusterous …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, he was. He got it from his mother's side of the family and I think
that he thought that the McBrides were … well, I don't know

Page 26

whether the McBrides were the ones, maybe his Grandmother
McBride … the Warren family had come to be today— and a number of them
are considered sort of visionary and not practical and that sort of
thing, but after all, people said that about James, and there was never
a more useful human being. But there was more of the poetic and very
sensitive leanings in that part of the family than on the Dabbs side.
His father had it to a degree and he had a great deal of most admirable
personality that came out in other way s. He was a very colorful
person.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

When did James start becoming aware of his concern about race
relations?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, he wasn't concerned about that. He grew up, he said, and … he goes
through all of that in several of his books, particularly the first one,
The Southern Heritage and in I'm
Going Home, too. Some of it comes out in there, although he's
not discussing that kind of thing. I'm Going Home is a
spiritual autobiography and he is much more concerned with what he
called the "spiritual oddessy than …

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… that sort of thing. You asked me when he became aware of that. He
didn't actually. When he was growing up, as he said a number of times,
there was no race question. He never heard it discussed by people; they
assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then
they weren't. That settled it. And, they had their place and we had ours
and we were polite to them, they didn't have the advantages we had and
they didn't have the things. They didn't have a lot of capabilites that
we had, but they were people and you were

Page 27

nice to
them. You were never rude to them because they could not talk back, they
could not defend themselves, they had to be like children not able to
talk back to their parents. You had to consider all of that. Manners
were very important to him. He was taught that from the beginning. But
he assumed that those things were taken care of and he was very much
surprised in later years to find that people were still talking about
it, talking about it again. The thing wasn't quite settled, you know.
But what got him into the thick of things was the matter of manners. He
had minded his own business and never … he had so much to do with his
literary career, he had his teaching and his courses and that he was not
concerned with political matters, and he would have said with
sociological matters, anything except what he was doing. Only with
studying, scholarly matters,

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

He taught at Coker College?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes and he taught English at Carolina before that. Well, shortly after we
came out here, I can't remember the dates, he always remembered them
exactly on everything, but anyhow, there was a time when a session of
the legislature stayed over time to debate and then vote itself … about
all they did that session was to vote itself an increase in salary. Oh,
they did that … now wait a minute. No. Maybe I am combining things that
weren't supposed to be combined …it seemed to me that that happened at
the same session when they did do another thing. They spent the whole
time trying to figure out how permanently to disenfranchise the Negroes,
keep them completely out of politics and keep them back where they had
been in Wade Hampton's day. James watched the papers for several days
and then he began to boil and boil because here were these people who
were supposed to be, they were the political leaders of the state for
better or worse and they were all

Page 28

we had and that
was the example that they were setting. Right out loud in the house, in
the legislature, with all the news media we had there. They were
proclaiming to all of the state, including the Negroes, that they did
not intend to consider the Negroes first-class citizens or to give them
any chance to become that. James said that you had always been unfair to
the Negro without admitting it or realizing it but you had never stood
up told about it and said so and flaunted it. This, all of a sudden, was
terrible manners. He was just scandalized by it. He sat down and wrote a
scorching letter to the State saying what he thought
about it and then, the lines were drawn.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

To the Columbia State.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, the Columbia State.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was that in about 1905?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. That was after we came from Coker, that was in the forties, I
guess, because it was after he came out here.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

O.K., I thought that you said the issue was disfranchisement?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, it was, but they were trying to keep the Negro—to keep Negroes from
voting as much as possible and to keep them out of the Democratic
convention. They could not have any places of responsibility and they
spent the whole time trying to figure how they could keep the Negroes
from voting and what kind of roadblocks they could construct. The poll
tax had been one. There were lots of things that they wanted bad enough
and that they could think up. They spent their time doing that and
telling everybody about it, as though the Negroes who were looking or
listening to it like everybody else, seeing them do it, were just
furniture, you know, not people who had minds of their own or any
feelings.

Page 29

They were afraid that we had lost ground
entirely too much and that Negroes were beginning to want to vote rather
seriously in some numbers and they couldn't have that, they wanted to do
something about it. Of course, James was so brash that about the next
year or so, when election year came up, he was something, I don't know
what, a delegate from this precinct into the county. And at the county
meeting, in preparation for the state convention, he suggested that we
elect some black man to be a representative. Well, I was glad to see him
get home in one piece because some of them couldn't take that. And he
continued to do what they considered outrageous things.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, was this all new behavior?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

He hadn't behaved about it at all up to that point. It is sort of like if
you suddenly go out for a new sport or something. You don't start
playing in a new way or developing a new technique, you start with
whatever it is you have, you just start that way, whatever you are, you
express in your way from the beginning and he began to express himself
in that field.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Had he always been real outspoken?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Yes, but nobody that I know of had ever taken offense at anything he
had ever done or said before because he was so gentle and so very
courteous, that if you are personally courteous in the field of your
personal relationships, there isn't very much for anybody to get mad
about. There is not much danger of insulting people. But he talked about
things that they were afraid of and he wasn't afraid to talk about them.
They would rather that you kept still and wanted him to shut up for
goodness sakes, and he wouldn't shut up. He didn't go around trying to
convert anybody, he just stood his ground and people

Page 30

asked him. If he felt this man was bad he would say something that
nobody had ever said before, they would bring up the subject and he
would stand his ground regardless. I remember one night that we were
over at McBridge's for some particular family get-together and friends
of ours were there, a man who had grown up with James, they had been
good friends as boys, came in with his wife, Frank Cain and his wife.
And Frank had heard or read maybe some letter of James' in the paper, or
heard something that he had said. Anyhow, the conversation got right
away to race.

It seemed to me that through those years it always did and I always
cringed and shook because I hated so much the tension and the hostility
that you could just feel. And I felt that James deserved it less than
anybody I had ever known in the world. Oh, I hated it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

In the forties?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I remember Frank said, "James, you don't know what you are saying.
Do you hear yourself? You are plainly said that niggers are just as good
as you are." James said, "Well, aren't they? Why wouldn't they be, why
shouldn't they be, why couldn't they be? What stops them from being as
good as whites?" And Frank tried to talk but he just couldn't get out
any words. "Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness." He grabbed his chest and
looked horrible. James said that he was really scared that he had
overdone it that time, he thought that the man was going to have a heart
attack. He was just totally overcome and in a few minutes, he just left,
still almost speechless. He couldn't stand it anymore, he couldn't be
around people who felt that way. They said their goodbyes and went home
after a very few minutes. Well, that kind of thing happened a lot of
times. I would try to avoid confrontations when I could but James would
sit there quietly, very calmly. After awhile, I finally began to notice,
I learned

Page 31

to watch the people in a group when
these kind of confrontations were always coming up, and pick out the
ones who had certain reactions, but didn't express them, tried not to
express them. Everybody was afraid to say anything that didn't sound
like everybody else. But I noticed that there were always one or two,
sometimes more, who didn't say anything at all and they would be the
ones that I would latch on to, with what little hope I had. They were
the ones who "saved the ship" or or something. Then after some several
years had gone on, not movement but things had developed further, so
that everybody was involved, of course there were still some people, but
there were more and more people who would at least express themselves if
they thought they were in safe company and they wouldn't be swatted
right down. They would make some very mild and half-way suggestion, that
they were not as prejudiced against Negroes as some people were and that
some people that we all knew—they'd go far enough to indicate it very
gently, very hesitantly. Things slowly got a little bit better so that
eventually people would speak up. Then came the great days and the young
people began to speak up. "The crazy, crazy young people. They didn't
have any sense, they didn't know what they were talking about they had
departed their parents' beliefs and all that kind of thing." They would
come up with the most wonderful, honest questions and comments and it
was always a joy to me to notice how … I drank it in, I lapped it up
…how students loved James. After he had talked at a college, often there
would be a private time in some teacher's home, in a student union or a
place where the students could get together and a whole room full of
students would come in to ask him questions and talk after a lecture.
They would sit around on the floor, knee-deep you know and if one or two

Page 32

would have to leave to study, they would close
ranks and move up. I remember that up at Wofford College for one time.
There were just lots and lots of places he spoke, but I remember
particularly up at Wofford that Dr. Lewis Jones would ask him up there
several times to talk to his history department, and that was the last
time that he went up there, in the spring before he died, the spring of
'70, Dr. Jones had him come up and talk. Afterwards, he had around to
his home a section, a certain number of about twenty of his students to
a buffet supper and to sit afterwards and talk with James. He said that
during the year he had all his students in bunches, so many at a time
and whoever was there came to the house—a very nice evening. After the
buffet supper, we went into the living room and all the chairs were
filled up and cushions were on the floor and where there were no
cushions, there were people on the floor and they all sat around talking
to James. Several of them had personal questions to ask him and I
remember one boy said, "Why is it that I can ask you all these things, I
never talked to you before, you don't know me and yet I can sit down
here and ask you things that I wouldn't dream of letting my father know
I thought?" That was just balm to my soul, you know. I just loved to sit
back and watch other people react to him and appreciate him because I
felt that everytime he wasn't appreciated, I felt it so keenly and when
something nice happened, I loved him.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, those must have been really hard times, the forties, for you.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They were rough times because I didn't have an outlet. I had no way that
I could actively do something except to do the harder things at home
that I always did as part of a background to make it a placid place

Page 33

that he could unwind in. I suppose that I felt
that was my chief function right then, to keep things as peaceful at
home as possible. Not gloss over them, but to be able to really relax
and to keep him assured constantly of my position that what he was doing
was something that had to be done and it was great. I still think that
was the biggest thing that could be done right then and I have no
regrets at all. What else would I have been doing nearly as important as
that? He was the most articulate person that I have ever known and he
was the most beautiful human being. I'm prejudiced, but I knew him
better than anybody else. If he could express something for both of us,
then I could do whatever was possible for both of us to make him free to
do it. I know that these Wofford boys asked him that night if they could
arrange with the college to have a place available that summer, would he
come up there that summer and just be an advisor in resident, just stay
in Spartanburg on the campus through the summer or through a couple of
months in the fall or sometime like that. He was so complimented, so
happy to be asked and said that he would be delighted. I like to
remember that in his last spring, he had that invitation and just the
sheer joy of knowing that these young, young, people really wanted
him.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That was a real vindication.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. He used to say that he didn't know why people worried over his not
having friends, alienating people and that kind of thing, he couldn't
afford to worry about the general public's opinion because the general
public never knew that he was there until he began to speak up. They
never had been anybody to him. People who criticize him now are not his
friends. All of his acquaintances were very silent when he needed them
to speak up and still, he never took that as a personal thing at all. He

Page 34

said that the friends he did have, any one
friend that he did have, was worth all the people who didn't want to try
to understand what he was talking about.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who did he consider to be his friends?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, in his own family, there were only the two sisters who stood up for
him and whether they agreed with everything he said or not, although
they did go along with most of it. They were very loyal to him and very
understanding and would defend his right to see it as he wished.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And who were they?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Sophie and Elizabeth. Neither one of them had ever married at that time.
Elizabeth was married four or five years before her husband died, but
that was a little bit later. They were very fond of their big brother
and very proud of him. They loved him very much and it didn't matter
whether he was a little bit a step ahead all the time of the regular
learning. That was alright with them, they were willing to let him go
along and listened to everything he had to say and lend him all the
support they could, plus their love as well. So, that made up for the
fact that a lot of people who had been close to him, even members of his
own family, stayed silent of this always, or talked about something
else. We just didn't discuss these things with them because it was too
unhappy. Too much disagreement on it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did you feel like you began to be ostracized in the community?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, in a way. James never did feel it. I did and I think it was because
I would measure ostracism in terms that didn't matter to him. If you got
left out of this or that or people tried to

Page 35

not to
see you in a certain situation. Who were they to him? I would and
worried because I felt the children would get some repercussions from
it. They were in school then.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did they?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They don't feel that they did. They never did feel that they were
overlooked and I think certainly that … it is curious, some of their
teachers, the old life-long family friends of their father's from
Mayesville were concerned about James and concerned about our directing
our children in foreign directions, you know.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

James, Jr.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, James, Sr.'s contemporaries, if you can call them that. Now teachers
of our children, were concerned about how we were training our children.
I heard once that someone in the neighborhood said, "Those poor James
Dabbs children, I feel so sorry for them."
[Laughter] I don't think that they felt sorry for themselves
at all. [Laughter] But in school, they got
honors that were just amazing. Certainly there were no inhibitions or
reservations there. None at all. They never could have gotten away with
that. I remember that Dick, Dick was the last one of all and the others
did the same kind of thing all the way through. James Jr. was an A
student all the way and he was valedictorian, a little class and a
little school, but he had been, well, he'd had his share a big share.
And Dickie I think was president of his class every year until his
senior year and then he got kind of ashamed of himself. They had regular
elections then and you worked for it. I never got used to that idea
because I thought that it was supposed to be an invitational thing, to
get a class office. But anyway, that wasn't the way it was done by the
time they came along. Dick decided after three

Page 36

three years, or maybe after two years, he wouldn't run the next year for
president anymore. He was president three years, and the fourth year, he
ran for treasurer, I believe it was, with the motto of "Sixteen years
experience handling other people's money." He got it, of course, but by
some curious hook or crook, the boy who ran for president and got it was
expelled or dropped out of school. Something happened to him, and Dick
was given the job. So, he wound up getting that kind of demonstrations
of very good feelings toward him. I don't think they ever suffered. They
didn't go to parties a lot, but nobody ever did out in the country in
those days. They were very, very few and far between and they never
seemed to miss that. They had friends and would do things.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did you just kind of remain aloof from the community?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, we did all the things, I just avoided party conversations where you
would get involved in these things. I preferred to be happy at home with
my own family. I suppose that I got to be sort of a loner then because I
was more comfortable not being in these social groups where I felt they
were being polite and not talking about something else so that I
wouldn't have my feelings hurt. That sort of thing. It wasn't
ostracized, there was somethig there … of course, there were times,
there were instances of people being very antagonistic and extremely
rude and cruel, but I wouldn't say that generally speaking, we were
ostracized at all.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Were you real active in the church?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Our church is small and it uses everybody and everybody, no matter
how you behave, if you have wild ideas, you are still needed to carry a
load. Brick Church—It was back in about '49, I guess, that I first heard
about United Churchwomen. I was invited to become a national board
member. That is a curious way to start. [Laughter]
There were no United Churchwomen

Page 37

members
in Sumter County except one, I believe. That was just sort of freelance,
there was no organization in the state. There had been several attempts,
but they had never really gotten something going, in either state or
local organization. There were a few scattered women in the state who
were very much interested in it and there had been a couple of starts.
It happened that the executive director of the national United Church
Women was a Sumter woman. She had been living in New York for a long
time, but she was a Sumter woman, Dorothy Shaw McLeod, a Presbyterian
minister's wife. She was an absolutely charming and very capable woman.
I told you that she put the glamour in church work for thousands of
church women. [Laughter] I got to know her
and she wanted me to get involved in the work and so she asked me if I
would consider, if I were nominated for a place on the national board,
if I would consider it. So, I talked to James about it and we had
decided that I didn't have to belong to anything in Sumter. I don't like
clubs, I'm not a joiner. He said that he didn't care, he said that the
only thing that he knew of in Sumter that he thought it might be nice
for me to belong to up to that time had been the AAUW. Then I found out
that the AAUW in Sumter had been infiltrated by one or two persons who
were determined to control it from the inside and to keep it from doing
anything liberal. So, I thought "To heck with it, life is too short for
that." We agreed that I would let it alone. So, I didn't belong to
anything in Sumter. I never have identified with Sumter particularly…
Then, this opportunity came along and he liked the idea. So, I thought,
"Well, if you like it enough and think that it is worthwhile, I'll try
it and see." I did go to the national convention, the first time that I
had ever left home since I had the children and I thought that I would
die before I got back here. They got along all right,

Page 38

but I nearly passed out. [Laughter]
That was the beginning of about a five-year stretch with the
United Church Women. I served as a Board Member and I had to have
something to do as a Board Member and I was put on the public relations
committee. At that time, we were just starting, even nationally. The
whole national committee was just about sixteen members to cover the
whole fifty states, you know. We had a radio and a t.v. committee and I
worked on both of them and I worked on the Protestant Radio Commission …
was that it? There were a million [unknown] All that kind
of thing. I went to workshops down at Emory University, summer sessions
in public relations, got particular training in audio-visual, to teach
these people to teach with audio-visuals and that sort of thing, and
particularly related to religious work, but not just restricted to that.
And then there was a marvelous National Communications Institute in New
York that lasted for a full week with emphasis on radio for a couple of
days, on t.v., on the press, all kinds of things and we met with just
the very best instructors and the very best workshop situations that you
could possibly get in radio and t.v. And movies. Everyday and every
night was filled with some sort of new learning experiences that were
really very exciting and most unusual. The press workshops were
sponsored by the New York Times. They gave us a tea, I
remember, one afternoon for the whole group and I met some exciting
people there. Then, various magazine editors were there. I remember in
broadcasting, Pauline Frederick. Do you remember her? Her name hasn't
been gone so long from the front. She was broadcasting for the United
Nations. She was at some of our lunchons and some of the workshops.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And United Church Women was a new organization.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It was a new organization and they were training their

Page 39

nucleus of public relations people that way. It was a
communications workshop.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And what was the function of the group? What were you all trying to
accomplish?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

We were trying to learn how to handle public relations, to spread the
idea of cooperation among the denominations in the women's work. The
United Church Women is the united effort of the women of many churches.
It included thirty-odd different denominations.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

All Protestant?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

All Protestant, yes. They are just beginning, apparently now, to work
somewhat with Catholic and Jewish women and they have always had
affiliations with them and worked on local projects within specific
towns together, but officially and nationwide, they are Protestant. It
is a united Protestant effort. That was one of the bigest learning
experiences that I ever had. It was terribly hard because by that time,
we had our whole family and they were all big enough to need me here all
the time and to miss having me here. Miles away, I would worry because
Dottie had braids down almost long enough to sit on, just a little girl
in the second grade or first grade … no, she must have been in the
second grade, I guess, and Dick was not quite school age. I would go
away for several days; it was just almost unbearable and I would promise
myself that I would never do it again and that I would get out of that
thing right then. I would worry about how her braids would get done and
I would arrange for some neighbor to do it and that sort of thing. Oh,
that was a real sacrifice for me, because I suffered through that. But,
it was a great experience and I suppose that I learned enough that maybe
it paid off in other ways. I don't know, I hope so. The children lived

Page 40

through it real nicely.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Now, am I correct in understanding that the United Church Women was a
liberal organization?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. Very. So, that put me as much beyond the pale on my own as James
was already. I not only reflected his rascality, but I had some of my
own. We were very marked there for awhile.

Then, we had "wild" friends, you see. There were the Durrs that I was
telling you about. Virginia Durr was Hugo Black's sister, no less.1

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's Sheldon Hackney's mother-in-law.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And her husband was an attorney who was always defending the wrong
people. I remember terrible stories that we learned from him that nobody
every knew anything about. One in particular, some black man …I don't
know whether he tried to rape a woman or what he did wrong, but he was
badly beaten and he climbed up those old rickety steps in the courthouse
… no, not the courthouse, the building where Cliff Durr had his office
and he climbed up those steps too beaten and maimed to walk, to Cliff
Durr's office. He never turned away anybody in his life … His life was
threatened hundreds of times. Virginia was a very articulate,
charismatic sort of person that people just soaked in. She could present
any sort of a situation. She wasn't afraid of the devil with his horns
screwed on tight, she was just greater than anybody. I remember how they
were … we had two sets of friends in Montgomery, Alabama. One was Cliff
and Virginia Durr and the others were Moreland and Marjorie Smith.
Moreland was an architect, a marvelous one. He had gone to Montgomery
and set up his own business and taken in

Page 41

over a
short period, two partners, but it was his business. And he got to be so
liberal that they were afraid of him and they kicked him out and somehow
managed to take over his business. He had a beautiful home down there
and I remember that when we went down to see the Durrs, little realizing
how complicated it was and how we might really endanger them. Actually,
I think that James went to address the Alabama Council on Human
Relations, which was practically underground at the time because it had
been persecuted so much in Alabama. We thought that we were going to
visit the Durrs, maybe the Durrs invited us, but when we got there, the
Durrs told us that their friends, the Moreland Smiths, whom up to that
time we had not met, were expecting us to sleep down at their house.
They had a lovely place, nice and quiet and they wanted to share in
entertaining us. So, they were having us there to spend the night. Well,
Virginia Durr had us to supper and she had several friends come in for
supper. Now, we never saw, we went to her house maybe three different
times, several different occassions and there was somebody Taft, young
Bob Taft, Jr. was there one time and I was surprised at that because I
only knew about Bob Taft, Sr. and he didn't seem like the sort of person
that would …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And he was a Republican.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. But everybody was on his own with them, you know. And young Bob Taft
I met there another time. But what I started to say was, we went there
several times and I have never seen beyond the front room of her house.
I would bet you that there was nothing back there, maybe a bed to sleep
on and absolutely the very essentials in the kitchen. When her friends
came in, she did not give a dinner party and have them all come in as
guests. Each one brought a dish and they were helping cover for her and
Cliff and entertain us and get together and enjoy each other, too,
knowing that the Durrs

Page 42

probably could not afford
to have that many people in. They were not allowed— they couldn't get
any other place to live. The house, they did not own. Now, they both
owned property. Virginia came from old aristocratic southern family
well, Black's family, who had a plantation outside of Montgomery, but
she couldn't get a decent place to live in Montgomery because nobody
would rent to such "dangerous" people. Their landlord would not fix the
walk, he wouldn't fix the steps, he wouldn't to this, he wouldn't do
that and they were living under extremely uncomfortable circumstances.
They didn't have any heat, they couldn't entertain. We often speculated
on what kind of food they had. She had hard times but they stood by
their guns. And the Moreland Smiths took in their guests for the night
and the few friends who came in to supper brought the supper with them,
and people just stood together and saw each other through. Did you ever
hear about Aubrey Williams? He was in the same … wasn't he also in
Montgomery? Yes, I think that Virginia and James and I met Aubrey
Williams for lunch one day and Aubrey was dying of cancer. There were
only certain places that they could go feel free to sit and talk. We
went to a sort of half way place. It was in a mixed neighborhood. It was
a nice, big place, very comfortable, inexpensive, a very ordinary
looking place. I had a very simple lunch, just to be together for a
chance to talk, because you didn't be seen talking with the Durrs or
with Williams and they didn't be seen talking with each other, you know,
unnecessarily, just for the heck of starting a riot.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Wasn't Williams in Washington?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I don't know whether he was or not. James knew all of that, I just
stayed in the background and listened to these things

Page 43

and tried not to …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You got to know Virginia Durr through the United Church Women?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, I got to know her through the United Church Women. I got to know the
most liberal women that I have ever met through the United Church
Women.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So, is that how James got to know Clifford Durr? Through your contact
with Virginia?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I think not. I think that he got to know him through the Alabama Council
on Human Relations, who asked him down there to speak and the Durrs were
members. The Durrs and the Moreland Smiths, and the Smiths later went to
Atlanta after he got kicked out of his business, went to Atlanta and
settled there. They had a lovely place in Atlanta, and he had worked a
lot with the Southern Regional Council and did extremely well. But those
people were the sort of people who belonged to the Alabama Council and I
believe that it was that council … weird things happened to us in lots
of places, but I think that it was the Montgomery Council that met …
nobody knew where it was going to be ahead of time, you didn't talk
about it ahead of time, but when it was time, we were taken to the place
where the meeting was. It was a Negro church in a very rundown section
of the city. I never saw the church, it was a dark, dark night and the
streets were extremely ill lit and you couldn't see the building at all
and I had to hold on to James and somebody else who was with us. Maybe
it was Cliff Durr. I had to do it not to stumble, I couldn't see where I
was walking. We got out, we were told to park the car sort of back of
the church on a side street. The bigger street ran in front of the
church and down

Page 44

a little piece, there was a street
light hanging, naked bulb. We were to park back here where there were
some trees and it was in shadow and the light wouldn't reach. Then we
were to walk down to the front street, come in by the walk and come into
the front entrance of the church. Well, we did that, but there was no
light anywhere. When you got to the front door and reached out to open
it, it opened itself and we went inside and the vestibule or whatever we
went into was black dark. Then we were taken to a dimly lit next section
and from there into a back room where the windows were all heavily
draped and it was brightly lighted. It was a small room and was jammed
full, people were standing around the walls. It was packed. Aubrey
Williams was there, I remember that. That was before we had lunch with
him that time and I didn't know him. James had known him for a long
time.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

This was in Montgomery?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Montgomery, yes. He had been there for some time. I knew that he was
very, very ill. Virginia said that he had been getting worse steadily. I
happened to notice a time when he reached into his pocket and put
something into his mouth and I knew that he was taking medication and
was very ill, but he was there, still fighting to the last breath. Well,
anyhow, we went back into that room and James talked to them and they
talked about their problems. We knew … I don't know how we learned these
things, where we learned them or from whom, but while we were meeting
back there, the police were patrolling the area trying to find where the
meeting was. They had heard there was such a thing planned and they
meant to find out and break it up.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

This was the Alabama Council on Human Welfare?

Page 45

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. The Alabama Council on Human Relations. It was a purely voluntary
thing, a personal sort of thing that was not connected with any [unknown]. I remember that when we were all through
talking, several people went out a few at a time. Aubrey was among the
first. I remember that Aubrey couldn't stand to be around people. He
couldn't hide the way he felt.

So he just eased out like he was going to get a drink of water or
something and didn't come back and then somebody else did and that was
the end of the meeting. After James talked, they asked him some
questions and they exchanged problems and that, sort of thing and it got
real quiet, the room began to thin somewhat and I thought it was a
little bit odd. Because I hadn't seen a meeting sort of dissolve like
that, but it was carefully done. No crowd of people left that church
that night, you see. They just disappeared into the night a few at a
time or one at a time in different directions. We didn't go out the way
that we had come in. When we went out, all we had to do was step out of
the back, that was a corner room of the building that they met in as it
turned out and the lights were cut down very, very low and we were
almost the last people out. We were let out the back door. I remember
the man who showed us out cautioned me …I don't know who he was, he was
a black man, he was very courteous and thoughtful, I don't know whether
he was the minister or the chairman of that group. Anyway, he was very
active in it. Anyway, as James and I went out to go together, he said,
"Now, be careful, Mrs. Dabbs, there is a step right there." And he
reached out as though he were going to steady me, James was on the other
side and we were holding on to each other, and the man reached out and
said, "Be careful, Mrs. Dabbs." Then, he pulled his hand back. He
realized, I suppose, that in case anybody was watching, he wouldn't dare
reach out and be kind and thoughtful to a white person. He wouldn't

Page 46

dare touch somebody.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Surely not a white woman.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Certainly not a white woman and certainly not if the police were watching
because that was all it would take. He said, "I'm sorry not to give you
a light on that step. Just go very slowly and be careful." There was a
light right overhead, but he didn't dare turn it on. We could barely see
the outline of our car just fifteen feet away at the edge of the curb.
He took the safest way out for us. I don't mind telling you that I was
relieved when we got several blocks away and were sure we weren't being
followed.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Were you aware of the danger?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Scared half to death.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did you go with James to most of these things?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Everywhere, especially when I knew they were like that [unknown]. I was terrified to think about him going by
himself. I had a feeling that at times, it might be some help if I went
along. I don't know whether it really was, I just hoped it would be just
the fact that I was there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did you ever run into a crisis?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well no, we usually skirted them like that. There was one time when the
Southern Regional Council met in Atlanta at Clark College, Dr. Benjamin
Mays was president, you know.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Morehouse College?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Morehouse. Well, isn't there a Clark Dormitory … or isn't there a Clark
College, too?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

I don't know.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, it must have been Morehouse College because I think that Dr. Mays
was president at the time. But Morehouse is not part of

Page 47

Atlanta University. Well, we went to Morehouse, but I guess
that meeting must have been at Atlanta University, because I have got
that stuck in my mind, It's down on the corner of that street— a big
long block … I guess it was Atlanta University. Who was the governor of
Georgia at that time?2

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They were father and son … well, the governor of Georgia had said that
one of the most evil things in that state was the Southern Regional
Council and he was going to get rid of it. Who is the bridge down at
Savannah named for? Over the Savannah River. That same governor. I can't
remember it. Why is it that you can't remember things when you want to?
Well, anyhow, he had his deputies out and that night, there was some
business part of this meeting and I think that after that there was a
sort of a reception type of thing with people milling about all over the
floor, just a social get-together with people catching up with each
other and that sort of thing, which is the nice part of most
conventions. In the midst of that, as that got underway, a whole horde
of apparently newspaper men barged in at one time and we knew, because
we had our detectives too, we knew that they were the governor's men
sent around. They had gone out and made a record of every license tag
around that whole place and then they came in and they managed to get
pictures of practically the whole crowd. That was a black list.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

When was it?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I don't remember which year. I could pinpoint it if I could just remember
what year it was.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Early forties?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I would think so, yes. Or the mid-forties. The forties and

Page 48

and the fifties, I know that things are bad now, but the
forties and the fifties were really difficult times and most people
don't know about it, because they had nothing to do with it. They would
have nothing with it. They would not speak, they would not move, they
would not listen. They would not be in the wrong place, they would not
be alone anywhere or take any stand and so, they were out of it. And the
people who were in it because they had to be there, they were the kind
who had to be there, the people who were involved were in dire danger
that is unlike anything that we have had since then. They just stood so
alone.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What supported you, what held you up?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

James. And I hope I held him up. He was magnificent. He had no measure,
no competition except himself. Nobody set his standards and he didn't
interfere with somebody else's, but he had such a strength that he was a
tower for everybody else who valued what he did and could see him for at
least a part of what he was. He was so concerned about truth and about
being honest with himself and about being the best self he could be, as
he said, the best human being he could be," regardless of anybody else,
just be the best I can be, better than I was yesterday," measuring
himself against himself over and over. He was so concerned with all that
that he was a strength to everybody else. He was a mediator because he
was never overpersonal about his views at all. He had an uncanny ability
to be objective about things that he cared so much about. He didn't see
them as personal issues and I think that's why people turned to him and
always listened to him. I never saw anybody who would sit or listen to
him for just a few minutes or in conversation, who stayed angry with him
as a

Page 49

person even if they came there thinking that
he would say things that they didn't like. They would say, "You're
crazy! That's impossible! Don't you see what you are getting into?" But
they saw him as a person getting into this other thing that was not
himself, trouble, disenssion, new ideas, scary ideas. He was just so
real and just concerned about other people. You had to admire it and you
had to feel that as long as that stood, there was hope for the
situation. I remember once we went down to Miles College in Birmingham,
Dr. Lucius Pitts was president of Miles College at that time. They had
built a beautiful, big house for the president. It was just lovely,
beautifully furnished. It was so new that it didn't look very lived in,
but it was a lovely house. We were guests at his house while James made
a series of talks over a couple of days or something like that. Well,
you talk about crises. Dr. Pitts had been in crises. He and James had
been friends for a long, long time. They met on many occasions in
conferences or what not and were companions in the programs that they
had. They got to know each other quite well and got to be very friendly.
So, he knew the whole situation when he went down there. But Dr. Pitts
had been going through very troubled times. He was still in them and up
to the night before we were there he had had police bodyguards in his
house. They stayed there around the clock. He said later that he didn't
mind it so much. James asked him if they didn't make him nervous and he
said, "Well, yes. I got nervous over all the coffee that I had to sit up
and drink with these boys." [Laughter] He
had been too outspoken for a black man, you know. I guess that he had
been too liberal, which is sort of curious, you don't think of black
people as liberals, you're not supposed to. but he had overstepped and
he had just been too much of a … He was a very fine person and he has
died since James did, I think, but

Page 50

he was a very
fine person. James talked and I was scared. I didn't go to his talks
because he talked to classes and several different groups. I didn't
trail him around, that was too much. I could go be lost in the whole
audience and I didn't like to do anything that was really conspicuous. I
saw something of the campus and some of the buildings and met Mrs.
Pitts, of course. After a couple of days, we left, but you know, I was
on pins the whole time because here I was in a house where there had
been threats, to the place and the people, too, and I was certainly not
making it any better by coming in as a white person and being there. It
is impossible to think that they didn't know we were there, whoever
"they" were. And yet, Pitts was determined to go ahead and teach class
and have James. James was determined to go ahead and do it and "if these
people want to be wild, that's their feeling, not ours." There was work
to be done and he'd go ahead doing it. We had to live like normal people
and not hide all the time. man James was, I've never seen such courage
and a sense of a thing to be of a person to be as he had. All of that
just made it impossible to escape being in situations that were
dangerous. I can't remember what happened in Shreveport. He went down
there to a very large gathering. I think that it was a Presbyterian
large church gathering. His topic, whatever it was, threw aside all the
laws of self-preservation. [Laughter] At
Shreveport, Louisiana, at a time like that … there was a good deal of
tension. There had been several incidents in this area that did not make
the papers over the country, feeling was running kind of high about
several particular things and he got lambasted in the papers the next
morning. We arranged it so that we were there the night before the
speech and we got a good night's sleep that night. Then, the next day,

Page 51

all day long … it seems to me that he was
doing something of his business, but it was the kind of thing that would
antagonize the press and when night came, we were all packed for home.
He made his speech and we just quietly walked out to the car and got in
and left that town just as fast as we could because there were all sorts
of … well, there were actually threats against him and against anybody
who agreed with what was being said around that meeting. There were
press people there or police spies and we knew that and he thought that
the best way to keep order was just not to be there. So, that time, we
drove straight through from Shreveport to Atlanta without stopping. I
never been so tired in my life from driving and driving. I was
hypnotized the last good many miles, and I was the last one driving. We
had a friend in Atlanta who wanted us to spend the night with her. She
didn't know that we were coming in from such a drive. I don't know how
far it is, but it seemed like days and days. I think that it was two
nights and a day, all day long, something like that. That was before the
roads were as good as they are now. You couldn't make good time. I
remember coming into Atlanta the next morning and James had finally just
given out. He tried to take the heavier part of the drive, the longer
stretches because he thought I would get too tired and we both tried to
sleep, each one when the other was driving, but we couldn't do it, we
were too tired to let loose. I was so tired and my head was going around
and around and my eyes were swimming. I tried to focus on the road and I
couldn't and we were coming into town. There were four or six lanes and
big old trucks on both sides of me and I didn't dare look at either one.
I just tried to head between them and hope that I was going where I was
supposed to go. None of them looked familiar to me, I had never seen
that side of Atlanta. I don't know where it was, but it was the proper

Page 52

side. I knew that we were nearer home and
further from Shreveport, but I also knew that I was on the point of
slamming straight into the side of a truck or anything, just totally out
of control and that I had to hold on a little bit longer and we would
get to Caroline's house… James had almost slumped out, he couldn't stand
it any longer, he was just broken. He finally managed to rally when we
got well down into the city and he could help me. He could read the
street signs and he knew what streets to look for because he knew a good
deal more about Atlanta. He could at least say, "Now, when you get to
the next stop light, I believe that's the place you should turn to the
right."

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You felt like you had to drive all the way from Shreveport to Atlanta
just to get a good distance between you?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, and on top of that, we did everything on a shoestring. We wouldn't
have any money to stop at a hotel or a motel. It never occurred to us to
do that. We used to go to the Southern Regional Council When James was
president it ran on such a shoestring literally that we did everything
under the sun to save them money. We would have to get there to a Board
meeting that started at ten o'clock in the morning and so, we would get
up here at four o'clock and leave here at four in the morning and drive.
It took us six hours to get there and we would drive and get there just
at ten o'clock and walk into the meeting and try to rest a few minutes
somewhere, if we could, in the afternoon. There rarely was anytime to
rest, not at a meeting like that. It was all crowded into one day
because the Council couldn't afford to put people up overnight. A lot of
people stayed over the night either before or after or both, but

Page 53

we didn't because we didn't have money. The
council didn't have money and we thought that we should not be causing
them to spend on us. After the meeting was over about 5:30 in the
afternoon, we would head for home. We had six hours to get back home
again. I would leave somebody that I could trust to stay with the
children.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Didn't you ever get discouraged?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes, yes. I never would have stuck it out without James.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did James ever get discouraged?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I am sure that he got discouraged and it is hard to know why he
didn't quit sometimes, but he never lost his faith in human nature. He
believed that somehow or another, people would win out. They had trouble
with themselves and had their problems, but he believed they would come
along. It is amazing how much of it came to pass, you might say, how
right he was. Of course, the famous things that people do have always
been those things. Somehow or another, the man he was made people
uncover potentialities that they didn't know they had, it made them
discover and believe in themselves. It gave them faith in themselves and
gave them courage to be themselves. He was just a shining example.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You said that when you were working for the United Church Women, you got
to know some of the most liberal women that you had ever known. Who were
some of the women?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, well, Dorothy McLeod was one and another was Mossie Wyker, Mrs.
James M. Wyker from Louisville, Kentucky. She is there now and is
retired. A beautifully capable, courageous, liberal woman. She was the
president of United Church Women nationally at the time that

Page 54

Dorothy Shaw McLeod was executive secretary and
Mrs. Wyker is an ordained minister of the Disciples Church. I remember
an interesting little thing that happened once in Atlanta … what was the
occasion? James and I went to a service in a big, beautiful church in
Atlanta and … I wish that I could remember why. It was a very important
occasion and dignitaries of the National Council of Churches and other
groups were there. Dr. Frank Laubach spoke, I remember. He was the "each
one teach one" missionary personality. I believe he made an address and
it was a religious meeting. It must have been sponsored by the National
Council and Mossie Wyker was the minister of the day. The church had a
very high … now, I don't know what you call this, being a Presbyterian
now and having been a Baptist, I don't know what you call the parts of
the church, but there was one raised platform where the minister goes up
into the thing to speak and then there was another on the other side
where a lay reader could speak, not maybe so high as the minister's. But
nobody except the minister ever set foot on the steps of that inner
sanctuary up there. Well, we had our programs and I knew Mossie and I
knew what had been planned for the day, I may have had something to do
with the planning, I don't know. But seated right behind James and me
were two women and they commented about everything. It was supposed to
be whispering, but it was a little louder than that because you could
hear everything. It was a stage whisper and everybody around heard it.
At the point when Mossie got up to go forward and up those little steps,
she started in the direction of the steps and I was so proud of her,
because I know what a magnificent job she does when she speaks. She is a
dynamic speaker and pulls everybody in sight to her point of view. She
can pull anything she wants to, you can't resist her

Page 55

and I thought, "Mossie is going to do herself proud and I am so
glad." But the women behind me started whispering, "Look, she's going
right on up there. Somebody ought to stop her. They oughtn't to let that
happen." And as they got so excited, I was afraid that they would stand
up and say something. Actually, they really were very worked up, I have
never heard such upset women in the church in my life. [Laughter] The only release that they got
was to talk back and forth to each other and they got louder and louder
and I was afraid Mossie would hear them. But I thought, "Well, Mossie
will be in complete control of the situation, she will think of
something." Well, she went on up her steps …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Now, this wasn't her church?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, it wasn't her church. She had never been in it before. Maybe the
women did go there all the time. They must have been local women. They
were not United Church Women. But they came maybe out of curiosity to
see what all these liberal people were up to. Mossie made a very fine
sermon and I was proud of her, just as I expected to be. I remembered
for a long time how concerned those women were that another woman,
purely because she was a woman, was about to mount the steps reserved
for a male minister. Mossie had been such a devoted minister for so many
years, brought up a family and all that and done a lot of extra outside
work, but she had also served as a minister at one church or another.
Her husband, I believe, was one too.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

I really don't have a clear understanding of what the United Church Women
was all about and why that was so scandalous in Sumter.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It was scandalous because it was liberal. Of course, it is liberal in the
first place to try to work … we found out in the United Church Women, I
learned fairly early that it is more difficult … you think that it is
difficult to get blacks and whites to work together, well, I don't know
if you could even imagine now in 1975 what it was like.

Page 56

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, were you trying to do that?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, yes, that was very bad. But even harder than that, than getting
white women to be willing to have Negroes come into their membership on
equal footing, it was difficult to get Methodists and Lutherans and
Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Disciples and what have you to work
together.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Baptists?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, now the Baptists have never been strong in the United Church Women
because they can never represent their home church. The Baptists are
autonomous in every individual church and they have trouble doing things
through representation because nobody represents a very large group.
Individual Baptist women, however, have been some of the most faithful
members and workers that we have had. In such cases, they have been on
their own, not representing their women's groups. They had to be women
with some conviction and some stability of their own to do it. But then
you had to get other people to work with them and that was really hard
in getting the races to do things together. We had a time in this state,
after I had been on the board for a couple of years, we got to work …
well, as soon as I started working with the United Church Women, we
started working on the United Church Women here, trying to have a South
Carolina one. I finally did write up that whole experience because we
wanted to get a history of the whole movement in the state. I don't know
what has happened to it all. I got my part together, what I remembered,
but the others … it was supposed to go into a little book, but it has
never come out. I don't know what happened. Anyway, United Church Women
in

Page 57

South Carolina started with four women rocking
in the sunshine on a front porch in Sumter one day. Little old Miss
Reid, who was up in her seventies.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Miss Reid?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Miss Rebecca Reid was the leading spirit here in Sumter. She was a cousin
of Dorothy McLeod and inordinately proud of Dorothy. She loved her and
would do anything to help Dorothy and her ambitions for the women of the
church. And she [unknown] Well, Miss Reid had several of
us come to her house and talk about this, her house being where she
boarded. She had a room upstairs. Miss Reid and I and Susie DuRant, who
agreed to be the president and a cousin of Dorothy McLeod's, Lucille
Shaw, sat out there and talked and rocked and talked. We decided to
invite several people we knew of who might possibly be interested in
such an organization, to come meet with us in Columbia, since Columbia
was so central to most of the state— about a couple of weeks after that.
Well, we did and by that time, we got ten people to come and we decided
at that meeting that we would organize and we did. We had a president.
Susie agreed to be president and I think that Lucille Shaw, Dorothy's
cousin, agreed to be secretary … I'm not certain. I've got all of this
written down somewhere. Then we needed somebody to be responsible for
leadership training, to begin to get things organized and know how this
thing was done and learn to set up. We needed a good public relations
person to not just do publicity but for public relations, to sell the
idea to church women across denominational lines, the idea that they
should work together to

Page 58

do some of these things
that women always like to do and the churches depend on them to do and
they could be so much better if they would put their heads together and
all the effort together. Such as taking the walls away from the asylums,
I mean, the chains and iron bars outside, that kind of thing. I just
happened to think of that, that is a very minor thing, but that type of
thing, developing half-way houses. Things that are not theological at
all and women can do better if we all get together and push. Well, I was
the sucker who got rooked into the public relations and it was fair
because after all by that time, I had had a chance to find out what they
were thinking and how they were going at these things on a national
level and I should have paid back some effort, for all that. So, we got
to work on it and Susie was president, I think, for two years [unknown] She was a very capable denominational worker and
she liked the idea of working with other denominations, but she really
wasn't strong enough physically for any demanding work. (She was older
than I am.) So, Susie resigned and I took over her job and it was during
that time that I learned a lot of things and was able to put into
practice a lot of things that I suppose I had slowly learned. How to
handle in South Carolina, where nobody ever had interracial meetings,
not only to get black and white church women together, but to make them
eat together. About half a dozen of us sat down and sweated that out. We
laid our plans and no army general ever planned a strategy more
carefully and it paid off. We decided that no matter whether we had ten
people or fewer, we were going to have an annual meeting in Columbia of
all the people, just individuals around the state that we knew about and
slowly build up a solid, reliable, list of Protestant women who wanted
to get together and talk over these possibilities. We would have a
meeting [unknown] and those individual members would make
up the state group

Page 59

of United Church Women, that we
would get together once a year and boast each other's courage and make
plans and so on. The first year, we just met, all morning and we went
out and got lunch and then we met in the afternoon. Susie was president
that second year. So, then the next year when I was president I said,
"Let's not do that anymore, we've done that and now that is finished.
Let's try the next step." So, the ladies of that church where we met and
we had a hard time trying to find a place in Columbia every year who
would let us meet. Some church.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

With black women?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. It was never in the sanctuary … I mean, for some years it was not in
the sanctuary, it was not in the sanctuary at all but in an educational
building or something. Now, the black churches would always have us, but
I said, "No, that's not the point. They are already willing to have us.
We need to have a white church. We are not going to condescend and be
put up on the front seat of a Negro church. We go in together and we sit
scattered about in a white church. So, we managed to do it, but the
ladies of the hostess church made coffee and sandwiches and that first
year, somebody sat at the coffee table and poured the coffee and we came
up like you would do at a reception and got a little plate and napkins
with some sandwiches and your cup of coffee. You walked about and talked
to your friends or if you didn't have friends, you tried to make some.
You were polite to everybody and if anybody looked lonesome, you went
over and talked to them. The next year after that, we had little card
tables and you could sit where you pleased. There were plenty of card
tables, more than the members had to have and if you wanted to go and
sit at a table all by yourself with your best friend and not associate
with anybody, you really could. But, you were sitting down in the same
room with all these strange people you had never eaten with before. And
for

Page 60

black and white, it was a brand new
experience. It was really exciting to watch these people learn. Not two
people in the whole room had ever done it before, had ever eaten in the
same room with white or black, whichever they were not. Finally, the
third year, we had one big long table where everybody sat down and ate
together, they served their plates at the same place, sat down together,
ate together and they have ever since. We never do, you can imagine,
have a very big crowd still.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Were you president for three years?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I was president for four years and by the end of the four years, we had
ten city councils scattered over the state. We had a state council and
at the state council meetings, Mathew Perry was one of the
speakers—Mathew Perry a black attorney in Columbia, and we had invited
some men. Some ministers and some people working in outstanding
positions like the American Friends or with Christian Action Council or
something else. We had a feature in Christian Social Relations—that
department sponsored it—and Mathew Perry was one of the speakers on a
panel for them and James was another speaker and we had two women and
they [unknown] There were 120-odd people present at that
meeting, a lot of them local Columbia people and yet four years before,
no one. I had been there four years.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

When was this?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

About … I don't know whether it was my last year or the year before. My
last year was '54. I believe that it was '53, the next to the last year.
1953, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. The Lutheran and the
Episcopal churches were the easiest ones, or the least difficult, to get
to let us meet. Some of the ministers were good, just beautiful people
and they stuck their necks 'way out. Dr. Kenneth Morris was one. He was
liberal enough to be much criticized, yet he was the first to let us use
his Episcopal church.

Page 61

[unknown] a report that was given to a commission of his
church, an Episcopal church. Anyway, there was something else I wanted
to tell you about that …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You were just talking about the organizational structure.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, it was stronger than we had ever imagined. All that from about five
or six years before, from four women plotting to do this thing, you
know. What is so exciting is that there are always people, in that case,
church women, sitting back somewhere very quietly, waiting for somebody
to strike a spark and to know that somebody will go with them, that if
there is any point in doing it, they won't be just all alone. They are
ready to go, really. All they need is somebody to get them started. You
just start out and sort of fill in the ranks. First thing you know you
look back and here they come, shoulder to shoulder.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, were you committed to the idea in the '50s of social and political
equality for blacks?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. That's the main difficulty. [Laughter]
"This could lead to social equality?" "Well, what do you mean?
How? Why?" "Well, why not?" I can see how it terrified people and they
are still afraid of it. It is pathetic, tragic. They don't think like
bad people, they are just fearful people and they do just such bad, bad
things from being afraid.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You think that your attitude was what today we would call
paternalistic?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, that is a thing that James and I have both watched ourselves and
watched ourselves every step of the way. Because having grown up in a
paternalistic atmosphere, having always seen only that sort of thinking,
it would be very natural for us to be paternalistic. We were

Page 62

certain that we were to some degree paternalistic
now at what point had we been and how much so? And really improving? If
so, why not faster? We felt that it was a bad thing in this day. Now,
maybe in slavery times it was so much better than your attitudes could
have been that there was a place for paternalism for that transition
period, maybe. But this was much too late for paternalism and it is not
useful, it is not a good thing to be and can be a bad thing. So how
could we rid ourselves of what we had grown up with, just born into us
practically, you know and conditioned into us. We always wondered, James
always said, "I keep asking myself if I am in any way prejudiced. I
don't want to have a bit in the world, but do I have it? Did that thing
I said or this thing I did actually reflect deep seated ideas? Is
prejudice still there?" It is a thing that you dont' get rid of in a
hurry. It can be totally unintentional. It is a habit, an attitude like
of that of a certain amount of very limited condescencion, it's a habit
and most habits are unconscious. That's why they are so hard to break.
You can't get hold of them to do anything with them. So, you aren't
aware of it. Miss Reid used to laugh at it—she was a delightful person.
She said about tolerance that she hated to see people who were so
intolerant of each other of different customs or of different cultures,
or a different life style, she just hated to see those things. She had
spent a life time trying to be more and more tolerant. She wanted to be
totally tolerant and she said, "You know, I think I am. I think I have
finally made it." Or at least she said to me, "I got to the place where
I said to myself, 'I finally made it," and I was convinced that I had
made it and was tolerant now. I was the shining ideal and vision that I
had wanted to be. I could put up with any kind of person, any kind of
idea, I didn't let anybody shock me, even these wild young people, even
the reactionary people. Nobody shocked me anymore and I am totally
tolerant. Then, I suddenly realized that I am absolutely intolerant of
intolerance."

Page 63

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's Miss Reid talking?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, Miss Reid. [Laughter] So, you see,
condescension, that paternalism is like intolerance. It gets down and
then you don't know that you have it. You are afraid to say that you
haven't got a bit of it anymore. I suppose actually so long as you make
allowances for people for the reasons that they are different— in this
case, the reason is that they are black—if you make allowances for them
and don't demand that they measure up and be all of whatever it is, the
whole thing, then you are being paternalistic. And that is not what you
always meant by it at all. So, it is very hard to say that you are not.
I'm sure that sometimes I do make allowances, I 'll say, "Well, those
people never had a chance in their lives …" You are inclined to make
allowances for them. You feel like it is a generous, right thing to do,
to make allowances for them. Don't demand more than they can deliver.
But why can't they deliver, why don't they deliver? Maybe you have got
to make the distinction between they "can't" or they "don't" and they
don't because you don't let them or something doesn't let them. But now,
if we do honestly believe they could, maybe that's the test. I don't
know and I don't know how to say when and at what point you no longer
have any paternalistic attitudes. I don't mean to have them, but then on
the other hand if I look at myself, I realize that there are times when
I wonder if I make allowances to many times.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

People would be surprised though, I think, to hear you admit that you are
conscious of these attitudes.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They might be. I feel that I have gotten over condescension and more
paternalism than most of the people I know. I think that I am as nearly
free of it as anybody I really know personally and I can understand and
judge that. But at the same time, I don't know whether that is true,
whether you would call that totally free or not. Because there are
people

Page 64

I know that I feel I shouldn't blame … now
wait a minute, I say that about white people, too. If they have never
had the advantages of any education whatever, or other advantages that
would enable them to do the kind of job that I feel the situation ought
to have, then even if they are white, I would make allowances for them
because they didn't have those advantages. So, maybe that's not … unless
that's being paternalistic, too, that is paternalism. It is not
white-black paternalism, but it is being paternalistic, I guess.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What is the difference between being charitable and compassionate or
being condescending? And if you can walk that line …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, I think that is maybe what I am trying to get at. I don't know just
where the line is and I don't know whether you ever do know for sure.
You've got to be fair with people. God tempers the wind to the shorn
lamb and you've got to temper your judgements to the possibilities of
people's capabilities and not feel that everybody is responsible for the
same beginning potentiality. Because maybe they didn't start off evenly
handicapped. Maybe some of them had to make it up faster than others.
You make allowances for children, in school, you expect one of your
children to go after things differently from another, someone in your
own family, sisters and brothers. You will say, "Well, he is different
from the others, he sees it this way."

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But that, of course, always leaves you in a position of dominance, if you
are the one who is saying, "Well, I will make allowances for this
person."

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, now that could be called paternalism. That's looking down from your
height of superiority. But I don't think that I do that at any point
because somebody is black. I feel that I have gotten past that, long
ago. If that

Page 65

is … if I am seeing the line where it
really is between compassion and understanding and paternalism, then I
am not paternalistic.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Do you think that you can convey that to black people?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I have wondered. Now, I think that it depends on how well people know
you. I think that some of these people down at Penn, on St. Helena
Island— that Mrs. Chisolm, Mr. Boyd, some of these people— I don't think
that they feel there is any condescension in me. I think they know that
I have the greatest respect for them and yet, they know that I know that
they haven't had a lot of advantages that I have. I trust them to
understand that I feel my superior advantages give me greater
responsibilities and that I would judge myself much more strictly than I
ever would them because I would make myself measure up. I have to be
pitted against a different yardstick.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But you know, I get the feeling that the Boyds, anyway, feel like they
have had all the advantages that anybody has had.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes they do, they feel that it is a good life. Mrs. Middleton, Mrs. Major
… I love Mrs. Major. You've never really got to know her. She is the
dietician. She is so reserved and she is not the person to gush over
anybody. She has her own little ways of making her little allowances and
advances in a very reserved way, but you appreciate so deeply her
friendliness; you know it means something. She is very shy, actually,
but she is so dignified that she manages to keep her slight aloofness
and slight distance.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Is she the one who brought the flowers and fixed up the cottage when we
were there?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I had forgotten that I took her a box full of camelias once up here
to the dining room. And I really took them to her personally, but she
didn't know how to carry them because it was a great big old box of them
laid flat. When I went back to the dining room the entire room was full
of

Page 66

them. She had them on every table. That was
years ago. I learned at that time that she loved flowers so, so when she
brought these down to the house that time, I just thought such a sweet,
personal thing to do. That's the kind of thing that Henriette 3 would never think of because she
doesn't see herself in the role of hostess. Mrs. Major has a lot of
imagination and sensitivity and is a nice person, a very lovely person.
A lot of those people, I'm so fond of, really. I miss seeing them and I
don't get to see them. I wonder how they are?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The people down at St. Helena?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I care a lot more about them than I do about a lot of these people
in Sumter. It was a very moving experience for me.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well you know, I walk around this house and there are maps of St. Helena
Island in every room and evidence of you interest in Penn School all
over the place. It is clear that that is really a major focus of your
energy and interest.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I use it as an alibi for anything that I don't want to do. I say I
don't have time.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What is it about those people or that experience that is so gripping?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I think a lot of it is their own—I'm divided between their self respect
and their sincerity, their relationships to other people. They are so
genuine and the history that they have had is so real. They have been
through everything. You see things in American history generally, the
war, the hard times, the long struggle for improvement, the achievements
that they have had, recognitions and a long time with no recognitions.
St. Helena's had it all right there in their own little boundary. It
happened to them without any pushing forth from the outside world,
except of course, Penn always was supported from the

Page 67

outside for a long, long time, but those who were putting in the
money and putting up the buildings couldn't have done one thing with
just any sort of people. These people cared and there was something in
them that slavery had never snuffed out. When I was talking down there
the other day, or when I was getting up a talk, I realized and
emphasized to them that in the spring of '62, the first little class got
together and the people who came to look for an education…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You mean 1862.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Right, 1862. The first people who came to make up a class to get
learning, were nine mothers. They didn't think of children going to
school but women came and some of them brought their babies with them
because they had to nurse them. After awhile, they began to bring their
children and then it got sort of cumbersome and so tedious to have to
deal with to try to handle the children and home and cook the meals and
hoe the fields and go to school, that they just sent the children and
let the children tell them at home what they learned. In 1862, nine
women started and none of those women had ever seen a book or ever seen
a school and knew what it was like. They didn't know what it was to go
learn. Three years later in the spring of 1865, the school put on an
exhibition, which was like a commencement, to demonstrate what had been
learned to the uninitiated. And the children had learned to read, as
Miss Murray said, they could read through and had studied simple
physiology books, and they could make sentences with a subject,
predicate and a verb and an adverb when told to do so. Some in the
smallest class were writing compositions. They learned penmanship was
very important and if you could spell anything, you spelled it
beautifully. [Laughter] And all of that in
three years from people who had never seen a book.

Now, you know that

Page 68

is not just any kind of people.
As I said, I hadn't realized in terms of time, until the other day. It
is just one of the little examples of what it is about those people that
you see in other ways. The way they kept going after the big natural
disasters just has to arouse your admiration.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The way that they have always aspired to better themselves.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, and they have a certain kind of humility, that only the strong can
have. They can take suggestion and instruction and be helped. Not
everybody can do that. They know that is what is happening, but they are
glad to have it and they don't resent the people who give it to them.
That is more than I can say for some of the present day staff they have
down there even with all their advantages. But the people of the island,
it seems to me, are very remarkable people. I have seen such terrible
poverty there that it just tears you to look at it—tragic needs, but the
people somehow can be hospitable, they do little gracious things without
having anything to do it with. I remember one woman particularly who
walked like a princess. She wasn't ragged and she wasn't dirty, but she
couldn't have been more simply dressed. Late one afternoon, I was riding
along by myself looking for someplace that I hadn't been able to find
yet … it may have been when I was looking for Tombee.4 But anyhow, I was riding along very slowly and I
slowed down some more when I saw approaching me along the shoulder of
the road, a woman carrying a big white enamel dishpan under her arm kind
of on one hip. Behind her was a boy of about eight or so. It was hard to
tell, he wasn't very big and I had the feeling that he was quite small
for his age, but he was still a young boy. They had been fishing,

Page 69

this mother and her little boy and they were
coming along just about supper time. I thought of something to ask her
and stopped and asked her. I couldn't understand two words she said
because it was pure Gullah, but as musical as it could be. And she stood
there with that pan poised on her hip, with her back as straight as an
arrow, but relaxed, very gracious and giving me the information that I
wanted. It wasn't her fault that I couldn't understand it. I let her
talk a little bit just to hear it. I thanked her, asked something about
the fish, something that I didn't have to ask her, what kind it was or
where she got it or something. She had caught a great big old fish, it
was too big for any bass … I don't know, it could have been, but it was
one huge fish and it filled up that dishpan or whatever it was. It had
been skinned apparently and was gleaming white. It had been dressed and
washed at the water and it was ready for supper. She was going home to
cook supper for her family. She had done this thing herself and had had
some pleasure while she was doing it. She had rested, she had lived with
her little boy. You just felt that she was handling her life as though
she had chosen her life style and she was doing exactly what she wanted
to do. I felt sure that in that situation she would naturally want
things a little easier, but maybe she didn't. She knew the richness of
what she did have like I couldn't understand it at all. I thought maybe
you were a princess one time. On that island were princes. I mean,
people whose ancestors who came there were princes. I've come across a
couple of very interesting stories about that.

Page 70

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Have you?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

In Miss House's notes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Edith, you are a real romantic. [Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

One of those goes back from Leroy Brown, whose father Leroy Brown now is
a county commissioner for the twelfth term …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And his father was George Brown.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, who was the basketmaker.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Yes, the basketmaker.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And George Brown's grand-uncle was Alfred Graham, whose grandfather
brought the craft from Africa and taught him. And also, his grandfather
was lame. I'm sure that was right. I've got to research it again very
carefully and then I am going to see Leroy Brown and his wife, Corinne,
when I am down there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That is one of Mrs. House's stories, isn't it?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. The first man who came was Vaberlee and he was a prince, a very
powerful prince from Africa. He was sold, he was not a captured servant,
he was sold, possibly by his own people. Or maybe by some political
enemy. And the thing that is very curious is that in all his telling of
this, he never said one word of bitterness or criticism of whoever it
was who sold him into slavery. He doesn't even come out with personal
bitterness at his masters. He admits what a terrible time it was, well
not Vaberlee but Vaberlee's son, the second Vaberlee. I think the first
Vaberlee was the first one that I found who fitted that story that you
sometimes hear along the Sea Islands and I had not heard before on St.
Helena, of people in the early days who could not stand slavery and when
they were pushed just to the limit of their endurance and could stand it
no longer they stood up, lifted their arms and flew away to Africa and
were never seen again over here on this side of the water because they
flew back home. That old tale, I understand, is still whispered
sometimes down in

Page 71

the lower Sea Islands in
Georgia. I asked Tecumset if he had heard of it and he said that he
didn't know of one, but then I came across this and that was a story
that was told about Vaberlee because there were two men living at the
time that it was told, who had "seen" him do it.
[Laughter] For a long time, it was told and believed and
Leroy Brown might be very embarrassed about that. I do want to find out
from him and from his wife about it, if Vaberlee is a name in his family
because it sounds to me like the same family.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, they have been achievers, the Browns have been achievers.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Didn't Leroy go to Princeton or Columbia?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I don't know where he went. Leroy, of course, was a Penn man, and I'm not
sure if he went to Hampton.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

No, Leroy, Sr. went to Hampton. I'm talking about his son.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, his son. Well, now he has several children and they have all gone to
college, everyone of them. Cynthia, I think, is the daughter's name and
she was at Brown last year and I believe that she is about to finish at
Brown. I think that was at least the second child he had that went to
Brown and they just think that way.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

I want you to read a discussion in my dissertation, I'll find it for you
tomorrow, about all the troubles George Brown went through. It is just
incredible, all the tragedy in his life and yet, he put this child
through Hampton and kept his family together. Penn laid him off, you
know, as the basket maker. In the Depression, they put him on

Page 72

half-time and then during the forties, they
dismissed him. Here he had dedicated his life to Penn and to being the
basket maker, because Miss Cooley thought that it would be nice to
preserve that craft. Well, all this shouldn't be going on the tape.
[Laughter]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You were really active with the United Church Women and you've really
been active with Penn school. Were there other organizations?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I belong to other things. I am a member of Will Campbell's
Committee of Southern Churchmen. I am on the Southern Regional Council
…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The board?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, it is a board membership. Members are elective only. I mean that it
is elective only to a limited number of members and that is the board, a
little over a hundred members. You can have all the co-workers and
supporters that you please, get everyone that you can to work with you,
but it is a board organization. I am on the board of the Southeast
Institute of Psychotherapy in Chapel Hill. Well, there are things like
the local historical society.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You said you never were a joiner.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. [Laughter] I get into these things
because I am interested in what they are doing, I guess. This business
about the Institute of Psychotherapy is rather funny. I think that I
will float out of that in a couple of years, because it is not really my
dish anymore. In the beginning, the man who thought up the whole idea
started FREE-Fellowships for Racial and Economic Equality and he was
…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who was that?

Page 73

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Graham Barnes. I believe that he was a North Carolina man originally. He
was working on his dissertation at Harvard under James Luther Adams and
several other fellows, all doing graduate work under Dr. Adams who were
friends of his At the time that Martin Luther King was assassinated,
Graham Barnes was so shocked that he felt something had to be done, that
whites ought to take some leadership in this thing and do more to help.
He left his work, he dropped his graduate work right then and there and
never has gone back, I don't know if he will or not, and came down home.
He talked long and hard with a couple of fellows that he had known at
Harvard; in fact, they talked about it before he came back. He came back
and started working out a plan for an organization which would focus on
racial prejudice in the white-collar layer, which he felt was the
neglected area. People hit at the more privileged and they aim at the
extreme underprivileged because they feel that they are the more biased
ones, but they neglect that inbetween area where the blue collar workers
are and a lot of the material for the Ku Klux Klan, that sort of thing.
He thought that there should be somebody who cared about those people
and should work on them to eliminate a lot of racial prejudice there. I
think that the name of the thing was unfortunate, because it immediately
turned people off and made it very difficult to work [unknown], but his idea was good. He asked James if he
would serve in an honorary capacity, meaning that he would be a
counselor and not constantly pulled into meetings, as the first
president of the organization. He would get together from grants some
money for scholarships. Well, James agreed to do it and Graham has a
genius for getting money out of foundations and he managed to get
started in a big way with a real flourish. Some of his friends came with
him and Jim Adams

Page 74

came on the board, too. My James
and Jim Adams were the two oldsters of them sort of. The rest of them
were a couple of generations younger. They were Graham's age. Well, it
flourished for several years, four or five years and then Graham's ideas
began to change, his focus began to change and his ambitions took a turn
and since he was doing more work than anybody else and had started it
up, the rest of us little by little went along with him. But he was
thinking in terms of not focusing so hard just on racial antagonisms,
because there are so many other kinds too, and they are all tied in a
bundle. He felt that the best thing was to try to help people solve
their problems, whatever they were. So, he got into this psychotherapy
point of view and now what we have is a school of psychotherapy. Last
year, we gave master's degrees.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

At Chapel Hill?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. It's not part of the University, but in that Institute there. They
have beautiful and very roomy quarters out there Of course we are
running into financial troubles this year like everybody else and we are
not running a graduate program this year, but we may again next year. We
couldn't do the final granting of the degree, but that was worked out
through long negotiations with the Lone Mountain College in California.
They get a lot of credit because they have their name on the diploma and
we do all the work. We have a faculty and a couple of people on our
faculty are with the University too, and one is a practicing
psychiatrist in Chapel Hill. We have outstanding people from all over
the country there and they will have a quality institute and things are
going well, but it is not the sort of thing that I really belong in.
This business at Penn which gets down to the personal level of people's
difficulties and problems—it suits me better than organized class
approach or lettered techniques or that sort of

Page 75

formalized approaches and I think that I can do more at Penn, I could
account for more energy that I have goes further down there than at
Chapel Hill, I can work in an advisory capacity on a board about various
matters but certainly not about teaching of psychotherapy because that
is not my field, I don't know anything about it and I don't make any
pretense and I'm not expected to. Neither are the other board members.
The teaching is left to the faculty. We have to judge faculty by their
credentials and a trustee's role is very different from a faculty's
role. I realize that, but still I don't feel that that is exactly where
I belong. So, when I get through with any help that I can be to the
University's Southern Historical Collection and Dick decides where he is
going to be, he may not be in Chapel Hill at all, then there is nothing
else to make me go up there, nothing important enough to … well, the
Institute by itself is not enough to make me make that trip every month
or so. I've been going so often because I am on the executive committee
and it meets at least once a month.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, good heavens.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

So, I have been making that trek up there at least once a month and next
month there is a board and committee meeting together.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Edith, I don't know how you do all the things that you do. You have more
energy and you are out in that car driving up and down the highways all
the time.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I'll stay home more, I've got to stay home because I've got to get
this writing done and this is what I want to do. I have a hard time
beating myself to make me write, to make me stay at it, to pull things
together to write, but when I get started and get to looking things up,
I get so excited …

Page 76

I forget to eat, I don't want to go to bed. Then in the morning, because
I stayed up until three o'clock, then I can't get up. [Laughter] I just go overboard. I'm
intemperate about work when it quits being work.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, maybe this winter you can just be here with Duchess and the
fireplace and establish a rhythm.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, I'm hoping I can and if I do, I suppose I'll stick to it. I'll find
something to fit into it because it will be so satisfactory to feel that
things are in place and have a place to work.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, let's go to bed.

Interruption until p. 87

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

this is when you first came back to the farm?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. And there must be things there. We kept chickens for awhile and
James minded the tobacco barn himself and I made all the children's
clothes, even James' little suits. Did a good job, too. The best suits
he ever had.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You made a bed upstairs, too, didn't you?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes, Dick's bed in this room, I made and I made all sorts of little
bookcases around here. I learned how to make my own extension cords and
do simple little things like that.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Built a fire, too.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I sure did. [Laughter] So many things like
that.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

O.K., some of James' friends that you thought about overnight.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

A lot of nice interesting people. There are many, but one that I remember
is Robert Penn Warren. He met Warren the same time that he met several
of the group out at Nashville. What was that literary group called?

Page 77

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The Fugitives.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, Donald Davidson and Allan Tate, Red Warren …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

"Red" Warren?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Robert Penn Warren, yes. And there were a couple of other people as well.
I remember Martha Foley he talked about, Martha Foley was the editor of
Story Magazine and she was from New York and had
nothing to do with that particular group, but he met them all at the
same time at a writer's conference at Boulder, Colorado the first summer
after we were married. He stayed in touch with Robert Pen Warren all the
rest of his life. I ran into Warren over at Coker. I made a point of
going over there to see him because he spoke at Coker last year
sometime. I was so pleased that … well, I don't know, it was a warm
moment in a rather formal situation, but all of a sudden, when I went up
to speak to him in the drawing room with people around just aching to
speak to him, wanting to just shake hands with the man … they didn't ask
for autographs, or I didn't see them … I guess that some of them did,
too. Anyhow, that kind of a group, totally strange, admiring and
appreciative, but strange. He didn't recognize me at first, but I told
him who I was and he said, "Are you James McBride Dabbs' wife?" I said,
"Yes, it's been a long time since I've seen you. I didn't expect you to
remember me but I was sure you would remember James." He said something
about how he would never forget him but he didn't recognize me at first.
I had just seen him one time. James and I went up to his mountain house
when he was there for the summer, we were just up there one afternoon
and evening for dinner and part of the night. He had no reason to
remember me at all. That was some years ago. But he and James were warm
friends. They admired each other and appreciated

Page 78

each other's work and exchanged notes on what they were doing and what
they were up to, that sort of thing, you know. Although, they never got
to visit much. But they all met at the same time and that is why these
other names came to mind. Another that … two other writers that James
was very fond of, one was Mrs. Conant. Isabel Fiske Conant was a New
England poet of some importance over quite a period and when we knew
her, she had done most of her writing. She didn't write much anymore.
She was not well, she was very lonely. She and Frost were good friends.
They had been neighbors at some time or another and both of them planned
to retire to Florida and had Florida homes. She retired down there. I
know that she sent us a snapshot of the little house she had found and
named "Wingfold." I thought that was typically poetic. And that was a
wingfold for her, it was her last house. Mr. Frost came down and had a
home pretty close to hers. She worried about him all the time because he
was lonely, too. He and James were very special kind of friends.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Robert Frost?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Robert Frost. He lived in Vermont or New Hampshire, Vermont, I guess
… I think Vermont. I ought to remember the town, but anyhow, James and a
former colleague took a bicycle trip in the summer before we were
married. I was in New York that year and James managed the whole bicycle
trip, he said, so that he could come by New York and we could have some
days together and then he would come back by New York on the way home.
He said that when he got back to Coker and made a chapel talk about his
bicycle trip, he just happened to mention that it began and ended in New
York. [Laughter] But on that bicycle trip,
he and Fred Denker, his companion, a music teacher at Kent State,
stopped over to see

Page 79

Mr. Frost and they camped
overnight in his backyard, but they spent a good part of the time
talking in the house. I remember that he said that in the evening, a
neighbor, another poet named Bill Snow came over to see Robert Frost and
met James and Fred Denker. They talked most of the evening … well, far
into the night, on and on. Then Bill Snow went home, James and Denker
went out into the yard to their pup tents and went to bed. In the
morning, I don't know whether Frost had them over for breakfast or what
…no, it was after breakfast, I guess, but they came over to say goodbye.
Anyhow, they talked awhile again and James told me that Robert Frost
said, "Do you know what that Bill Snow did to me? He was back over here
before breakfast trying to argue again. I don't argue before breakfast."
[Laughter] Apparently, it was
interesting that Snow and Frost were such good friends and neighbors and
spent lots of evening talking to each other that way. James treasured
the memory of that one time that he was there and Mr. Frost was always
planning when he had a lecture trip or something to stop by, swing a
little out of the way, and come see us, but he never got here. One time,
James did an article for the Yale Review entitled
"Robert Frost and the Dark Woods." Of course, Frost was sent a copy,
maybe James sent it to him, anyhow he saw it. Frost wrote James that it
was the best article that he had seen on himself. He liked it better
than any he had seen written about himself and his work. Of course,
James was always a hero worshipper where Frost was concerned and he was
ecstatic over that It was praise from Frost himself.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was this before he met Frost, that he wrote the article?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Before he had actually seen him, yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Before he slept in a pup tent in his backyard?

Page 80

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, now wait a minute, it wasn't. It was after that. He had seen him.
Somewhere along there, after he had seen him on that trip but before he
wrote that article, Frost had lost somebody very close to him. I think
that it was his daughter, who had lived with him and was very close to
him. And Mr. Frost was very badly shaken up; he found it hard to accept.
He stopped writing and at some point he said that he had finished his
writing. I don't know if that was in a personal letter to James or maybe
just a statement publicly and it was generally known, but it was
understood that Frost would not write anymore. James knew why, that he
had been too emotionally shaken up over his daughter's death. He had met
the daughter and he had met Mrs. Frost. So, he wrote to Mr. Frost and he
told him about the experience that he, James, had been through when his
first wife died and how it looked for awhile and felt like that was the
end of everything, but life got better and better and he began to live
again and he found that there were sources for fulfillment and joy that
he had never tapped before, but he didn't come up with any Pollyana
stuff. He was too smart for and sincere, that and Frost was too much in
the depths to be treated like that. It was a totally, understanding,
compassionate, sensitive, gentle communication and it spoke directly to
Frost. They wrote about it a couple of times, back and forth about
Frost's depression. Sometime later, I can't think how long, I would say
maybe a couple of years or less later, after that correspondence, Mr.
Frost on his way down to his Florida home for the winter a place that he
rented, had set up a lecture trip. That was the time that we thought for
sure he was coming by Rip Raps but he didn't get here because an agent
had planned it for him and he didn't realize that it was important
enough to him that he schedule it and he didn't. When we realized that
he wasn't

Page 81

going to make it here after all, we
planned to go over to Columbia and hear him. He spoke at the University,
I think it was. Now, we got there almost at the time for the program to
start and we hustled right in to our seats and as it happened, had to
sit right up near the front because those were the seats that were left.
People hesitated at first to fill in and then they filled in more and
more crowding closer, getting it solidly filled but there were still
several seats at the front. So, the usher gave us seats way up at the
front and in just minutes, just after we got in, Frost came out from the
wings somewhere. Well, there were floodlights between us and we could
see him beautifully but he certainly couldn't see anybody in the
audience, couldn't pick people out at all. When he got up to speak, he
said some of the usual things about how it was pleasant to be in
Columbia and he liked South Carolina, he didn't know much about it, but
he liked it and he knew very few people here, but he did know several, a
couple, and he said, "As a matter of fact, I have one friend in South
Carolina, he might be here tonight, I have a feeling that he is. I hope
he is. Anyhow, I have one friend in South Carolina who is the one man
responsible for any writing I have done in the last couple of years. It
was because of his friendship and his understanding that I was able to
start writing again after I had stopped." James wanted to wave his hands
and say, "Here I am Boss," but he managed to keep still.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's marvelous.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Then afterwards when everybody was crowding up on the stage, trucking
across like a graduation line, trying to get to speak to him, he stopped
and he and James shook hands and held on to each other's hands and
talked and talked. James said that he was getting embarrassed because he
was taking too much of the man's time and everybody else wanted to meet
him, you know.

Page 82

But it was really a high time and a
great experience that Mr. Frost would say that it was because of his
understanding and friendship that he wrote again. He came out with a
whole volume, I think it was Beyond the Further Range.
This other volume of poetry came out just after that. Anyway, he did
considerably more writing after that and that was something that James
always felt so good about.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Of course.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Once years later, the gas man or somebody who came by here like that, a
tradesman, somebody who didn't know James personally at all, had noticed
a letter to the editor in the county paper and he asked James why he
took a chance on alienating people by taking strong stands for social
justice and James just laughed. He said, "I don't alienate anybody. I
might anger people who have never heard of me before and they might not
like what I say, but that's not alienating anybody who is my friend." He
said, "Don't you feel afraid that you won't have any friends at all.
Everybody wants a lot of friends and you won't have any if you talk like
that." After the conversation, James came back in the house and told me
about it and he was laughing. He said, "Think about the friends I have.
Any one of them, I wouldn't swap for all those people who are so
critical and so scared of what I write in the papers." Of course, one
person like Robert Frost took care of all the rest of them.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Do you think that James and you decided to come back to Rip Raps in part
so that he could be free to pursue the kinds of things that he was
interested in and not feel like he had to be too concerned about the
opinion of his colleagues.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I don't think that there was much of that in his mind, but it
worked out that way certainly. He wanted to be free from the

Page 83

drudgery of correcting papers, planning seminars,
any kind of teaching that he wasn't interested in at the moment. He was
a fantastic teacher, the best that I have ever known and he liked
teaching, he loved it. But he came to the place where he preferred to do
the writing and he couldn't do both because of the conflicts that time
demands and that sort of thing. I think that the other restrictions were
not in his mind, but I do remember that Dr. Green had just become the
new president of Coker, I think a matter of months or maybe one year
before James decided to retire out here.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who Green?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I can't remember. I thought that the whole thing would come to me. He was
not there but for a few years, but anyhow, he was a very nice person and
he and James were on very good terms, very familiar, and he told me once
that Dr. Green had said, "You know, to tell the truth, I envy you. Not
many have the courage to do what you are doing." James was coming out
here with part-time at Coker with a guaranteed salary of 1,000 dollars
annually and he was actually starting his second family. You know that I
inherited two daughters and one of them was starting college then and
the other was starting first grade when we moved out. My baby came at
the same time that we came out here. I came from the hospital to this
house, so he started off out here. That's the stage we were at and you
could expect expenses and all that sort of thing to be ahead of us. But
he elected to be free to try to write. He didn't get to for a long, long
time because he said that farming was a jealous mistress and he had very
little freedom. Dr. Green said, "I envy you that, you can go where you
please, you can say what you please and you can write if you want to.
You can teach or not teach and nobody has to like what you say or
whether you say it."

Page 84

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And he took full advantage of that freedom.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, he did. The freedom was there but it was not the kind of freedom
that he suffered such a need for.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And this home always was a refuge, as you were saying earlier this
morning.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

It was a buffer against the world out there and a place to come back to
and regenerate.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I always felt that if I could keep it like that, if I could keep it a
sanctuary, there was nothing in the world that he needed more than that.
He certainly didn't need more money. We took care of the money thing by
trying to be totally self-sustaining. We weren't consciously trying to
imitate plantation days where you had the work done for you and that
kind of thing, but we were trying to be self-sustaining as an isolated
farm family because that's what we were. The Depression was still going
full tilt and very few people had much money. We even grew our own rice.
We couldn't grow coffee and we couldn't grow sugar, but we grew sugar
cane and cooked syrup and we grew our own rice, as I said. We grew corn
and made our grits and meal and we grew wheat that we would grind for
homemade bread and I just thought that we were licking the world
singlehanded, you know. Single, because the two of us were together just
that much interwoven and we figured that as long as we had each other
and were both convinced that this was what we wanted to do, there was no
need to consider anything else. We didn't have any sense of loss. You
know, I was startled a year or two ago to realize from some remark or
casual conversation with somebody else, that those years were the
Depression years. I was on cloud nine. I hadn't heard about a Depression
and in all these

Page 85

years, I never thought about
that. It never crossed my mind. It was not a reality. I made the
children's clothes. I made little James, Jr.'s suits. Not a heavy winter
coat, I didn't manage that, although I did make little cloaks for
Carolyn That was one of the first sewing jobs that I did after we were
married, a darling little blue coat with a cape, I remember. She just
loved it, thought she was so dressed up in it. Well, sewing and cooking
and keeping things calm around here, trying to keep us comfortable
enough to be happy all the time, because that kind of comfort isn't what
makes you happy anyhow … I thought that was enough of a job for and I
felt justified in not trying to have a separate career of my own and
James and I were just a team. He would do some things and I would do
other things. I thought many and many a time of a former friend of ours,
a colleague of his at Coker who had been my teacher, too, just as he
was. She was never married and I often thought that as a student she
admired James very much and of course, that was perfectly all right
because everybody else did, too. She told me, I think right after we
were married, I was back over there for something and she was still
teaching at Coker and she told me that she just couldn't resist saying
something to me, I think that she still thought of me as a student and
was going to give me some of the facts of life and a little advice which
was very sweet of her because it was done in a very warm friendly
fashion, but she said, "I just have to tell you that I would give my eye
teeth, anybody would give anything to be in your shoes. You have a
chance to make a background for somebody who could be the lion of any
drawing room and he is just a wonderful person. Of course, you know
that, but I just want to tell you that I think you are so fortunate and
I hope that you are going to remember all you have

Page 86

to do is to make a background and let him be himself." I thought that it
was very perceptive of her, very generous of her to say that she would
like to have it so much herself. There was nothing catty about this. It
was just real nice and I felt warmer and more friendly to her than I
ever had before. I had admired her but I hadn't felt warm. She was a
rather elegant looking person and very self-sufficient and somebody that
you could hardly get close to and feel warm about easily. After that, I
felt more so.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You had been a student?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I had been a student at Coker. I was a senior the year that he came there
to teach. So, he had taught me for two years and that's how I got to
know him. So, I've always felt that maybe she was right. I was justified
in being lazy about some other things if I could just keep him relaxed
enough so that he could be his full self, because he was so much more
articulate than half a dozen other people I could name, that that was
his job to do the articulating. He could write and he could talk
unusually well and he had a beautiful mind and spirit to express the
right things in the right way and so, he was the spokesman and that was
right. I was perfectly willing to make a setting. Of course, if it was
here for us, it was here for anybody who was harmonious with us, anybody
who enjoyed what we enjoyed and would like to come just to be with us.
They could appreciate the place and they would get a certain period of
sustenance, but even on a brief visit you were free from worry and sort
of a new, made over, fresh, optimistic approach for whatever they had to
face when they went back. It was sort of apart from the world out here,
just because it is quiet and it is surrounded by enough woods that you
feel you are way off from everything—and you are. It's about
three-quarters of a mile down to the highway

Page 87

and
the Black River Swamp behind us is about a mile wide. There is not a
neighbor here right now. There is not a human being, I would daresay,
within almost a mile in any direction. And with all that country
remoteness, it never was lonely. Of course, it has been lonely like
nobody on earth could describe these last five years, but that is the
other side of the same coin. By the same token, it never was before and
I used to say that we could never be lonely and you couldn't say that
without a chuckle coming up because it was so smilingly interesting that
anybody could think this was a lonely place. It is just quiet and
peaceful and so rejuvenating. So, I think that we always felt we owed
the world something because we had so much and I don't know of anybody
else among all my friends who has just the same thing. There are lovely,
lovely places, beautiful, lavish homes, maybe, but not quite the peace
and tranquility that we find here and that so many of our friends found
here. It was sort of an extra responsibility to share it. We never felt
that we had any right to be selfish about it. It wasn't something that
we did, you know. It was a place that we were fortunate enough to live
in.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But you chose to keep it this way, you chose to keep it natural.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And to keep it unpretentious and unhurried and unstructured.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes, people have come in … well, we have even had reporters sometimes
who would make very thinly veiled slurs, snide remarks about how … at
one time, there was a stove in this room with the fireplace and when the
winters got so bad, we decided that it was more of an economical effort
to have a wood burning stove in here than to have

Page 88

a wood burning fireplace. It didn't look too good, but it heated the
study more and James had to be in here so much and James had to be more
comfortable than … and he didn't need to be hopping up and down to
replenish the fire all the time and still concentrate on his writing.
So, we had a stove and I remember that some reporter who came to
interview him, I don't know who he was, but he made a comment about how
a stove was out of place in this old house and said that it looked
rather bare. I was afraid that it was cluttered and he thought that it
looked bare. [Laughter] He just wasn't in
tune with it. That was all. [Laughter] And
it suited me for him not to try to get in tune with it because if he
didn't want it, other people did and he could do without it. But people
were always coming and periodically, somebody would come in, I guess
that they have given up on me because I haven't heard it in a good while
and they would say, "Oh, isn't this a marvelous house? Wouldn't you love
to get ahold of this and restore it?" I would always say, "Over my dead
body." [Laughter] Because in the first
place, the old English teacher in me rose up in revolt "Restore" means
to recover something that was exactly as it was, not to change it and do
things with it and fix the ceilings and hang a few balconies and maybe
put in a ballroom and that kind of stupid stuff, they would paint all
the antique furniture in bright new colors and so on, but I would really
feel insulted when people would want to do over the house, to restore
it. Because the original floors are all over the house, the original
walls, the plaster has never broken, things like this medallion around
the light are original, nothing has been patched. Now, the places that
just simply wore through had patches around the fireplace and in the old
kitchen before I did that over three years ago and in the dining room, I
believe there are a couple

Page 89

of boards that have
been replaced around the hearth because the family always sat right
there. Every evening, that was the sitting place. You didn't have a
parlor for everyday. You had a parlor and you kept it shut six days a
week and you behaved yourself on the seventh day in there. But except
for that sort of thing that always has to be done, even the floor in the
piazza and the bannisters are the original wood. When we came here, they
had the original paint. We had to paint the place and put in water and
lights and screens for the first time. I remember that we used
Sherwin-Williams paint on the outside of the house and the white paint,
excusing [unknown] … as some of my neighbors say,
"excusing" the blinds, was 2,000 pounds. One ton exactly is in this
house of Sherwin-Williams white top grade exterior paint. And nearly
anybody with half a bird brain can understand why I don't repaint the
house every few years. It got done and James said, "We painted it and my
children can paint it again if they want to."
[Laughter] Years later, we painted it again and he was sort
of apologetic about that. He told somebody, "Well, we just finally
decided that we would paint it every thirty years whether it needed it
or not." [Laughter] And it needs it very
much again now, but I won't be doing it for awhile. [Laughter] There are other things that are more urgent
than that. Those things never bothered him and it never seemed to bother
our guests, that the house badly needed painting. Now, one front step
got so bad one time that that bothered us a little. We were afraid that
some guest would break a leg and we had to have that done. That sort of
thing that was really urgent, we would do, but to keep it even as pretty
as you would like to keep it … I would like for it to be

Page 90

painted and always be in good repair without changing it.
James used to say that anybody could be rich enough to keep up a house
like this. I think that I told you maybe one time that he felt anybody
could be a millionaire, if he wanted to and act early enough, and you
wanted to be bad enough, but the price might include sacrificing a great
many other things including himself to do it. He said that he didn't
have any envy of anybody who got rich because he didn't want it that
much. One man, he died several years ago, a man down in Beaufort,
Calhoun Thomas, was in school at the same time that James was. I don't
know whether they were in the same class or if Calhoun came along a
couple of years later and James taught him, because he taught at
Carolina for three years shortly after he graduated, but anyhow, he knew
him at Carolina. And Calhoun Thomas later on, talking to somebody in our
family, said, "Yes, I remember James. You know what struck me about that
fellow? Most of all, he had the least respect for money of any man I
ever saw." [Laughter] I think that Calhoun
Thomas thought that was sort of a bad thing to say but it impressed him
at the same time and I also suspected that he felt a little bit envious
because James was not bound by any awe of wealth or social standing or
any particular prestige symbols. They just didn't bother him, he always
smiled at them and went on about his business of things that he
considered more important.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

When you all did all this farming and stuff together and made yourself
really self-sufficient, you didn't actually go out in the fields and do
the farming work, did you?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You did?

Page 91

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I didn't do much of it. I had the children to look after and the
cooking and washing and ironing and the sweeping and so on. We raised
chickens and I did look after the chickens. Later on, we got into the
chicken business seriously and had a couple of thousand birds out there
at one time. And I still was doing that part myself with James doing
everything else. He drove the tractor … we started off with a mule and
one man. Of course, there were families on the place who were renting
and had been doing most of the farming and James had somebody to help
with the whole farm, he had plenty of help, but the man who helped him a
lot in the garden, I remember, was disgusted about the second year that
we were out here when James bought a little garden tractor. It would be
a very ancient, over-simplified looking thing today, but it was a great
big step forward for us. James said that if he could just pay for that
little tractor, he thought it would pay off—it would be a good
investment. It wasn't as cranky as a mule for one thing and he could
feed it when he wanted it to work only and could do a lot more work with
it. The man who was helping us was very much disgusted because he said
that he had to have something that he could say, "Whoa" to and it would
whoa. [Laughter] This tractor just didn't
"whoa." So, James was the one who handled the tractor. Somewhere, we
have a snapshot of that first year when we planted oats back here by the
back of the carriage house, down to where the old ford crossed the
branch, that's a pasture now. Well, that was a grain crop of some kind
then and we have a snapshot somewhere of that field with little small
stacks, only a head high, scattered around all over. James had cut that
hay and raked it and piled it himself and we went out and took a picture
of it. We were like two youngsters just starting out and it

Page 92

stayed exciting that way all the way through. It was always
at that time …well, we started off out here, when I was about thirty and
he was about forty, thirty-one and forty-one or something like that. So,
we were not just spring chickens starting out our first experience, and
yet, everyday was a brand new day. I used to get up some mornings so
excited that I couldn't stay in the bed any longer and I would sneak out
and go look and see if it was really the day out there, if it was the
same place, what was going to be new today. It was just like you were
going out to meet the day. I couldn't wait to see what would happen. And
the children were always like that and I would be so exhausted that I
would think, "Oh, I'll never live to see them grow up." But at the same
time, that was a physical thing and every single morning, if you are
young enough, you get rested in the night and in the morning, I would
wake up and think first thing of all about the children and wonder what
they were going to do today, "What is going to happen today?" Or I would
wonder what somebody else was going to do today. It was just marvelous
to live in a place like this with nice people around you. No wonder I …
if I hadn't been a romantic before, I would have become one, I guess.
[Laughter] There were [unknown] people on the place. I wish that I had kept a
record of them and the things that happened, old sayings and little
interesting things that involved some of the people. One time, one man
who came to this farm just about a year after we had moved here, or
maybe the same year, Uncle Joe Hampton. He was an uncle of the last man
who is about to leave now because he has a job somewhere else and I
don't need to farm out here, Uncle Joe was one of the old-time people
who hunted and trapped and fished every spare minute he could get. He
knew the woods and he knew the branch and the swamp back there toward
the river and late

Page 93

afternoons in the fall and
early spring, especially he used to be out with his gun after a squirrel
or a rabbit. He knew their habits and feeding times and the best places
to find them and all that sort of thing. I remember that we were always
having emergencies and too many things, we would get into states of
crisis that got compounded immediately you know, and you think that you
will never live through it, if you stop to think that much. You just
kept one foot after the other one to see if you could survive. One of
the times like that when James had been going along and feeling tired
and getting sick or something, late in the afternoon, James was away
from home and Uncle Joe came to the back door and one of the children
came running to me and said, "Uncle Joe is here." I said, "Well, he
comes by all the time, why do you look so scared?" He said, "I think he
got hurt." So, I flew out to see what was the matter with Uncle Joe and
the poor man was standing at the back door. He had his gun, I think
under his arm or leaning against him and he was just standing there and
he was holding one hand in the other. I said, "Uncle Joe, what is the
matter? Are you all right?" He said, "Well, Miss, I shamed to tell you.
I just too shamed to tell you." He was laughing sort of hysterically, a
very uncomfortable, miserable laugh, but he thought he had to laugh
about it, you know and maybe keep from getting scared to death. He said,
"I was down yonder shooting a squirrel and I shot my hand, I hit my own
hand. I was down yonder on the branch after a squirrel and I saw him
hopping. He kept going from one tree to the next." Joe was trying to
follow him around on the ground. He said, "He got in a great big high
tree and there was a lot of vine in that tree, a grape vine and I
reached up and I couldn't get him in the sight of my gun. I finally got
him in sight and the vine was a little in the way and I pulled the vine
out of the way and shot my hand and I shot my finger off." He was
holding the finger. It had come completely off. He

Page 94

was holding it in his hand and blood was just gushing out. I said, "Wait
just a minute, let me get a rag to bind around that to hold the bleeding
the best I can." I grabbed something, I always used to keep what my
mother kept when I was a little child, a rag bag, old scraps of sheets
or things that had been through the wash and boiled clean and put down
in a clean bag for emergencies. So, I got a piece of soft sheet and tied
it tight around his whole hand and I wrapped it and told him to hold it
tight himself and get in the car—and I grabbed up the two children who
were here at the time and put them in the car with him and we sat out
for the hospital twelve miles away and got into the emergency room. The
doctor said that it was too late to put it back on and Uncle Joe said,
"Well, I guess that it is kind of silly, but I don't know how to do
without my finger. You don't throw away a piece of yourself, so I
brought the finger along for that reason, I thought maybe something
could be done." That was one of the rough times. Everybody has troubled
times and I used to have them on Saturdays and Sundays when the doctors
were out of their offices and maybe gone to the beach for a well
deserved rest. Even the dogs got snake bites on Saturdays when the vet
was gone. [Laughter] It really happened
that way. [Laughter] It seems more so than
it was, but the people who came through these yards … I wish I could
remember all of them.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Edith, since the last five or six years, since James has been gone, your
life has changed a lot.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It has changed totally, but it hasn't settled down to any particular
routine yet. I haven't really accepted it's being so different, and I
haven't mapped it out. I think that maybe I should get organized. I
should be systematic, practical. I have tried to be as realistic as I
can, but I suppose that I

Page 95

have never lived by a
schedule that I had set, it was set by the circumstances around me
pretty much and you do get more or less into a routine but you don't set
it all by yourself and say, "All right, now everybody conform to this."
So, I'm not convinced that you can do that for yourself, but to some
degree, you have to plan and I haven't worked it out.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But idn't you tell me a couple of years ago that especially with that
book, Face of An Island, that you have begun to
develop new confidence in yourself and in your own ability to write a
book?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, that is true because now I don't make a setting for anybody and that
was what I was doing before, trying to keep things so that … I guess
"setting" isn't a bad word, trying to make it possible for James and the
children to develop as they saw fit and to do the very best that they
could and make whatever contributions they wanted to make to themselves
as well as to the society around them. But now, they are all beautifully
taking care of themselves and I suppose that I owe them … I've had the
feeling all my life, I mean ever since I've had the children, they have
always made me proud of them, every single one. I've never had the
children disappoint me or do things I was ashamed of or embarrassed
about. So now, they were always concerned that I should be proud of them
and so now, I feel positively and consciously that it is my turn to do
something that they will be proud of. I suppose that it is a token of
appreciation or something. The biggest kick I ever get is having one of
the children brag on something that I've done. I get a kick out of it,
you know, they want to tell their friends that Mama did something
outrageous, but delightful. [Laughter] I
just love that. Any

Page 96

approval that I get from them
just makes my day. I have found, or I am slowly finding, maybe, that I
can be somebody. I won't be the same person that I was, I'm only half,
say, of the person that I used to be, but there is another half of me
that needs developing, I guess. I am beginning to learn that if you just
take a chance on just being happy\##\ doing what you want to do at the
moment, whether it fits anybody else's ideas or not, you can have a lot
of fun. You may not do everything that you want to do and you may not do
it just the way that you would prefer to do it, but there is still a lot
of fun to be had. I'm beginning to make progress with being somebody all
by myself. I've developed a lot of confidence, although along with it
there is a certain sort of curious philsophy developing that … people,
some people call me a historian, which is ridiculous, it is so funny. I
don't know any history at all and everything that I found researching
for one book, learned for one book, I had to dig and dig like a fourth
grader because I didn't know any of it. I'm doing something that I
wanted to do, I'm finding out what I am curious about. Then, I think
that sometimes… it has always struck me as funny, I'm a "writer." I'm a
historian, I've written one book, so I'm a "writer." I think, "Well now,
how many other people walk around under the same hat. They've written
one book or they are writing a book or they have written half a dozen
books or are teachers and have students do the research for them and the
students actually should get the credit for the books because they
aren't capable of putting together the grammar that it took to make that
book, and yet they are called and accepted as "writers" and
"historians." They don't know any history and they can't write. They
don't know a bit more about it than I do. It doesn't mean that I know
anything, but I don't have to be too sad about it because I know some
other things about

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children and a lot of home
[unclear] > country things that
they don't know, maybe. We all know something of our own.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, I think that you are just breaking through to a real truth, that
you probably stood in awe of writers and historians and thought they
knew so much.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And it is absurd. They are just people. And I have certainly found that
the people who are my best friends now are people who are doing things
and care about things and people that I respect very highly. Young and
old, I respect and admire them or else I am too busy to fool with small
talk, and too interested in other things, you see. I have learned that
the people who are doing things or know things, or are things, are the
most approachable people of all. They are the most single-minded, maybe.
I don't mean that they have to be uncomplicated people, everybody is
complicated, But people that you can get close to, people who want to be
known and loved and shared are the real people. They are not the ones to
stand in awe of. So, I am slowly working through this thing. I'll get
there eventually, if I live long enough. I've got to live a long time,
because you know you live to get something done and I will have to live
to be at least 120 to get caught up on all this that I've got. I
actually line up ideas of things that I want to do, I could give you a
list of at least half a dozen full time jobs that have just got to be
done and nobody is going to do them if I don't.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, I am so glad to hear that. [Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Really, I'll be around awhile.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Good. Who are your best friends? Guion Johnson?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, I don't know how to name them for fear of leaving some out, but
Guion and Guy Johnson are certainly very good friends of mine. And

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some of the first people that I think about. And
then there are a lot of people that James knew best and that I love so
devotedly now. I always saw them as friends of his, but when they didn't
have him to communicate with anymore, I discovered that they were very
happy to communicate with me. And they could. And we can communicate. We
are friends.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Is Will Campbell one of those people?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes, Will Campbell is certainly one of them. He is a very colorful
friend we both had for a long time and I always saw him as James'
friend. James said that he could go to Will to get his theology
expressed in understandable terms, to get other things too, because Will
is quite a philosopher. He is the cornfield type and he has a keen,
marvelous mind behind that everyday language that cuts through to the
center of things and says it in his own way and nobody else's. James was
talking to him one time some years ago, he liked to remember that, about
Will's ministry to people who were really … well, I started to say hard
to minister to, but people with Will's education, training, skills,
intellectut, you would think that they would not be the ones that he
would choose to minister to and yet he can get close to people that
nobody else in his circle of friends can approach at all. He has
preached to the Ku Klux Klan. He has made great friends who were big Ku
Kluxers and he really, really cares about those individuals because he
feels that they have been neglected and misunderstood and there are
reasons that they have so much bitterness and frustration built up in
them and he wants to get into that and know them and be one with them.
He told James that it wasn't so hard. James said … oh, I don't know what
the question would have been, "How do you present religion, what is your
approach, how do you preach to people who are so different from the ones
you used to speak to, formally? How do you reach a lot of different
kinds of people?" Will

Page 99

said, "Well, there is one
message that is simple, there is one God and all men are bastards but
God loves them just the same." [Laughter]
James loved that. The move he thought it over, the more it covered, you
know. It sounds so simple, it sounds flippant, but Will is not a
flippant person. He's a tragic person. He has unusual depths of emotion
all the time and he's never on the surface. He was one of the dearest
friends that James had and he is a good friend of mine now. The last
letter that James wrote … he wrote two letters and mailed them the same
morning that he died. One was to Will Campbell and in less than a week,
Will was here for his funeral.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

How did they get to be friends?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well now, let's see. I wonder how that was. They might have met through
the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, when it was a fellowship rather
than a committee and I know that he had known him in that capacity for a
long time.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

James was in the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes, James was president of it at one time for a while. Will is now
the … well, they have a president, but it is a small committee and Will
is the director.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did James get interested in Penn School through Howard Kester and through
the Fellowship?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

He knew Howard through other things, the land program or something like
that, but he knew about Penn before … well, not before Kester's day. To
tell you the truth, I don't know how he knew about it. James was just a
well-informed person and knew what was going on, you see. And he had
known about that school down there for years.

Page 100

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was he a good friend of Marion Wright?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, he and Marion Wright had been at Carolina together and Marion Wright
was the president of the Southern Regional Council for four years, I
think. And then when Marion went out, James took over. I mean, he was
elected president to follow Marion Wright and James served for six years
as president of the Southern Regional Council, along with his other
matters. He thought that was long enough and finally just quit anyhow.
But he followed Marion as president of the Southern Regional Council and
when Marion left that, he came to be chairman of the board at Penn, on
which board he was already serving. And when James got through with his
six year stretch at the Southern Regional Council, Marion was ready to
leave down here and had gotten James on the board by that time for a
couple of years and so, James followed him as chairman of the Penn
board.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That was the first that you …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

That was the first that I knew of Marion, or of Penn. When James and I
were married, we had quite a honeymoon for just plain folks, because we
saved up for a long time and he needed to get away completely. He had
two children and so on. So we farmed the children out here with his
family and we roamed the world for about a month. The first thing that
we did was go down to Beaufort, down to the Gold Eagle Tavern, which is
torn down now. I remember that Hunting Island at that time had just been
made accesible by a causeway. You could actually get there without going
on a boat.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What year were you married in?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

35. There was even some talk about making a government stretch of beach
down there and developing it in some way. We thought that would be
pretty bad because it was idyllic and other-worldly. It was the most
beautiful

Page 101

beach that I've ever seen, but we went
out there several times. We saw the lighthouse and walked the beach and
I don't think there was a human being on that island except us. There
were no houses, no reason to be there unless you went to swim or
something and there was nobody to go swimming with. It was just brand
new. I remember driving to get there, driving across St. Helena Island.
And at one point, James pointed down the road, he may have seen a sign
for Frogmore or something like that, but he pointed off to the right
where a road came in and dead ended to the one that we were on and he
said, "There is an interesting school over there. I would like to go see
it sometime. Maybe we will have time while we are down here to go by." I
don't know, somehow on your honeymoon, you don't have time for things
like that. [Laughter] And we never got
around to visiting it, but he told me then that there were two ladies
there, two ladies from the North, he didn't know where and didn't
remember their names, who were running the school all by themselves and
they were the only whites there. They had some black helpers that they
had trained mostly and had a very good school. It was a very interesting
experiment. I remember at the Gold Eagle [unknown] the
waiters in the dining room were all Penn-trained people.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, really?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

All of them. Anybody trained at Penn was vastly superior in whatever he
did to people trained in the same thing anywhere else. Their school was
that superior to everything else. They were furnishing teachers for all
the black schools up and down the coast of several counties and all over
the islands. Penn was really a light to the islands. James knew about
that. As a matter of fact, Mr. D.R. Coker over at Hartsville who was a
big Coker College supporter and had been a friend of his for a long
time, knew about the

Page 102

school and was real
interested in it and Miss May, his wife, told me not long ago,
remembering those times, that Mr. Coker had given Penn School at one
time a bull when they were improving their herds, cattle, you know.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That was David Coker?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

David R. Coker.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

He was a trustee of Penn for awhile.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, I believe that he was. So, I suppose that you might find that there
were a lot of people who knew something about Penn but I just didn't
happen to run into them or we never talked about it. I did not become
acquainted with it until James went on the board, that was while he was
still with the Southern Regional Council.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And now here you are writing a book about the history of the island.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, that's one way I can console myself when I feel that I am sailing
under a false flag, to claim that I am doing a history of Penn. Nobody
could do it and nobody else has gotten hold of stuff. Now, you have, but
outside of us … now, Guion Johnson has done a marvelous book on the
social history of the Sea Islands, remember which tells a lot of the
island's history, but she wasn't doing that thing. It was the Sea
Islands sure enough that she was talking about and hers is a wider
study, not so in depth about St. Helena.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, nobody has done the kind of work that you are doing.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I hope that this is going to be different and I hope that it is going to
be very interesting. Of course, about four people up at Chapel Hill
besides Guion have done books. Her husband, Guy, did one on the folk
music. He is quite a musician himself and there was one on the language,
the Gullah and

Page 103

several things like that, I
forget them. Clyde Kiser wrote one … Clyde Kiser, by the way, was a
classmate of James' up at Columbia University. He knew him up there a
couple of years and Kiser is from the University of North Carolina group
who wrote some books on Penn. He wrote From Sea Island to
City, a study of the migration of the Sea Island people,
particularly from St. Helena to Harlem.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Tell me now, didn't James study under G. Stanley Hall?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes. When he was finishing at Carolina, I think in his senior year, I
found several letters written by Dr. Morse in psychology, I guess.
Anyway, this Dr. Morse at Carolina was a personal friend of G. Stanley
Hall and Morse was eagerly sponsoring James, when James said that he
would like to go on for his master's in psychology and it would just be
heavenly to study under G. Stanley Hall, but he didn't have any money.
Nobody has, of course, to go do graduate work and he said that he would
probably have to settle for what he could get. Dr. Morse said, "Oh no,
if you want to study under G. Stanley Hall, why don't you just do that?
I will be glad to write him," and so on. So, he got some sort of
financial help for James up there. I don't know what it amounted to, but
I'm sure that there was some. He endorsed him, I suppose you would say,
very heartily to Dr…